Word: terroir
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...their wine cred is that Europeans, and now Californians, contend that the specific soil their vineyards sit on makes their wine good, that the flinty rock or dusty earth imparts a distinctive flavor. But Fred Franzia, maker of the popular $2-a-bottle Charles Shaw, told me that terroir--a French term embracing all things regional, from soil to climate to topography--is a concept winemakers use to overcharge. "Anything will grow with sun and water. We can grow on asphalt," he said. "Terroir don't mean...
Recently, the terroir concept - that a wine should express the specific soil, microclimate and cultural traditions that produced it - has become more widespread in the Champagne region. In exceptionally good years, some houses are now producing vintage wines profiling a single year's harvest, or single-vineyard wines made from a particularly outstanding parcel. But not without controversy: at the Champagne Information Bureau's annual tasting in London in March, some winemakers wrote off the single-vintage mono-parcel champagnes as a ploy to market novelties as luxuries...
...harvest is expected to bring in 400 million bottles. With a steadily increasing demand, winemakers have asked French regulators to commit what would once have been considered heresy: to redefine or even expand the boundaries of Champagne. The beverage, after all, gets some of its character from its chalky terroir and rough climate. Yet the Syndicat Général des Vignerons de la Champagne, the grape-growers union, argues that an expansion would simply be a return to Champagne's origins. When the region was first defined in 1927, it included 128,500 acres (52,000 hectares), but that area...
...Niels Stokholm's biodynamic dairy farm a short drive from Copenhagen, I suddenly understand that I am looking at last night's dessert, a minimalist "cannelloni" of frothy sheep's-milk mousse with a frozen granita made from sweet herbs and grass straight from the pasture. The connection between terroir and table just reached a whole new level. Forget caviar and Kobe beef and ruined designer shoes. Real luxury is being able to walk among 50 red Danish dairy cows on a farm that boasts a prehistoric altar to the Norse god Thor...
Worldwide, Pinot Noir's uniqueness is that it seems to carry in the most pronounced way the taste of the land from which it hails. (The French refer to this as the goût de terroir.) "Pinot from here does seem to reflect the mystery of this place," says Neill, whose merchant great-grandfather arrived during Otago's gold rush and grew wealthy from selling supplies, including alcohol, to miners. "So your family have been peddling hooch around here for 150 years," jokes Peren, who hails from such quintessentially Kiwi stock--as New Zealanders would call it--that his grandfather...