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Thom isn’t the only one to lay the “meaningless” charge at the doorstep of the vocal terroirists. As Roger Bohmrich MW says in an informative piece on the “terroir debate” in Wine Business Monthly, when the definition of terroir goes much beyond nature (climate, exposure, etc) to encompass nurture (viticultural and vinicultural intervention), terroir becomes everything, and therefore nothing.

Bohmrich, in much the same voice as Appellation America’s own Alan Goldfarb, would have us assessing the nurture part of what makes the wine what it is in terms of specific sorts of human interventions, categorizing them as favorable, neutral, or suppressive to the expression of terroir in wine. He offers us a “Terroir Wheel” as a canvas on which to focus the ongoing debate. It’s a handy graphic, which I’ve already got pinned up over my computer.

Mirroring the terroir debate is the controversy about the concept of appellation. Thom Elkjer’s defense of “appellation”, notwithstanding, the chorus of antagonists – “appellations are created by marketing departments not nature” – is very persuasive. Appellations are just spin! Terroir is just spin! End of debate. Well I hope not, because when we retire these debates, it WILL BE THE END of the North American wine culture.

We need to ask ourselves WHY it is that we need to identify terroir and delineate appellations in North America… admittedly we are late coming to the game that has been the foundation of the world wine culture for eons. I would argue that this need (for terroir and appellations) borders on desperate, and, yes, marketing is central to that need. But the marketing department doesn’t have to be central to the process of identifying terroir and delineating appellations.

Put simply, the compelling public-consumer interest in wine is in its diversity. Terroir distinctions, based in ecological fact, and appellations delineated in respect of those ecological facts, are the mapping tools of diversity. To be sure, well-defined appellations should also “map” diversity in nurturing elements that contribute to the taste-of-place.

The fact that so much terroir talk is bull, and so many appellations are just distribution-minded assemblages, only heightens the need for pushing the process of documenting terroir from the ground up, and doing radical surgery on appellations to give them ecological authenticity. Then, and only then, will the North American wine industry be secure and the wine culture enriched.

Roger Dial
Publisher, Appellation America
r.dial@appellationamerica.com

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Appellation America is a comprehensive online wine portal providing access to every winery, grape varietal and appellation on the North American continent. Its mission is have the best wine writers in the wine business working in each region to discover and develop distinct wine region identities, and then build appellation consciousness in the broader wine consuming culture.

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