On his second round in Taiwan to bring his message of terroir in Champagne, Peter Liem speaks even more clearly and precisely now than he did last year, and he needs to be clear and rational because terroir is not an easy concept to encompass.

Here is how I understand his message: When we taste a wine and reach through it’s complexity for the feeling of the environment where the grapes grew, we must feel the message through an immensely complex array of similes and metaphors, for we have no language to describe wine aromas directly.

Some things are easy to recognize, especially in a tasting with many different wines. Oak aging is easy to spot, that slightly oxidative feeling that comes through if the base wine for the Champagne was aged in oak barrels.

But how can this effect be part of the terroir? And what about all the other interventions by the winemaker, from pruning and picking-dates all the way to aging, dosage, disgorgement and beyond? In an era that worships minimal-intervention winemaking, Champagne is still one of the most crafted of all wines. I think most people will agree, therefore, any discussion of terroir must include the winemaker. Winemakers are part of the terroir.

Ok, and if the Winemaker’s work all aims to express terroir — the environment in which the grapes grew — then to ascribe our own tasting impressions to terroir, we must first believe that the winemaker serves the terroir, that the slightly oxidative character derived from wood aging of the base wine expresses something essential from the place where the grapes grew and the wine was made.

To embrace these sensations as expressions of terroir entails an act of faith, for only when we believe in the sincere intentions of winemakers can we believe in terroir. Once we believe though, all the winemaker’s interventions serve terroir; all their actions, however paradoxical, are in this very Dionysian sense, sacred.

Having made the act of faith, we believe that winemakers are servants of terroir, and through that belief we perceive and admire (worship) the infinite possibilities of terroir through specific and pure expressions.

I don’t mean to sound cynical. My wife is the best wine taster I know, and she describes the taste of terroir very certainly as something in the mid-palate, a feeling of breadth or narrowness. Me, I’m still hung up on the interventions.

But thanks to Peter Liem I’m a lot closer to believing than I was.

This also from the OED via Google:

Terroir, Noun

The complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including factors such as the soil, topography, and climate.

the characteristic taste and flavour imparted to a wine by the environment in which it is produced.

noun: goût de terroir; plural noun: goût de terroirs.