Wine & Spirits - Fall 2012 - (Page 80)

last word by Tara Q. Thomas vegetable TERROIR wine is not the only food closely scrutinized for a message from where it grows. I have always believed that there can be terroir in vegetables. Black heavy dirt, worked correctly, then with Early Girl transplants put in, with just enough water to take root, then dry-farmed after that in a coastal climate where you have mild to warm days over a long growing season, are going to have a distinctive ﬂavor and texture proﬁle compared to the same plants planted in the Central Valley, where the soil is thinner and the heat requires weekly irrigation. You will get a much faster tomato, but not one with the same ﬂavor and character. In Georgia [in the Caucasus], when it is walnut season, you can go round the market and taste walnuts of diﬀerent origins, and they have areas that are more renowned for them. In a way it is easier to taste true terroir with unprocessed food than it is with wine because you remove the “man” element, which is such a determining factor in the resulting wine. —Isabelle Legeron, MW, winemaker, Georgia —Martin Bournhonesque, farmer, San Francisco, CA I can recognize Eliot Coleman’s carrots from Harborside, Maine and strawberries from Harmony Valley in Wisconsin from palate memory. Does this mean that carrots and strawberries, or apples and tomatoes, express terroir? Taste of place deﬁnitely ﬁgures in this mix, but I can’t tell you how much in relation to all the other factors. Produce plants for the most part are shallow-rooted and grow in soil that is constantly being enriched with compost and mulches. Weather, the farmer’s selection of plant variety and cultivation practices are dominant contributors to taste. Our ability to taste place emerges from a process. Cheese is a non-vinous example: the grass is distilled by the cow into milk, then concentrated through separation of the whey and evaporation. Many cheese tasters recognize the place, method and breed behind a cheese. The vine is royalty on the terroir continuum. It has long roots and is long-lived enough to see many vintages through. It can synthesize topography, soil, substrate, climate and, dare I say, culture. But how well does a handful of grapes freshly plucked from a grand cru vineyard convey terroir? Clearly fermentation has a role in taking the juice of those grapes to the terroir octave. In Orange County, New York, we have a farming region known as the Black Dirt Region. Long ago glaciers left an extremely rich soil behind (50 to 90 percent organic matter compared to 10 percent in other areas), which is high in sulfur. This soil is great for farming in general, but especially for onions. It may not carry the marketing name of a Vidalia or Walla Walla, but they are similarly amazing. —Galen Zamarra, chef/owner, Mas (farmhouse), NY I’ve had a butternut squash grown on one Pennsylvania farm and another squash from a farm a few miles away. Same season, same weather, same everything (except the notable fact that they came from diﬀerent seed collections)—diﬀerent dirt. The ﬁrst squash tasted like cardboard. The second tasted like butter and nuts, and squash. It was the best butternut I’ve ever had. —Ian Knauer, author, The Farm: Rustic Recipes for a Year of Incredible Food (Houghton Miﬄin Harcourt, 2012) —Odessa Piper, chef 80 W I N E & S P I R I T S FA L L 2 0 1 2

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - Fall 2012

Wine & Spirits - Fall 2012
Contents
Can You Taste Terroir?
Bordeaux Underground
False Identity
Life in the Dirt
Hi-Fidelity Terroir
Dirt Prophets
Five Elements
Terroir Top 100
Vegetable Terroir

Wine & Spirits - Fall 2012