Bordeaux Has No Terroir

In response to my recent comments to Alder's "The Myth of the Monolithic Wine Palate" post at Vinography, which deals with the recent Cornell study that analyzed scoring trends by professional wine critics in the U.S. and U.K., Alder said, "A [professional wine critic's] score is not a validation of terroir, it’s a validation of a very good wine."

But of course that’s not true. Allen Meadows says, "While the concept of terroir remains a controversial issue in the opinion of many people, it is not controversial to the Burgundian mindset—or to me, either. I attempt to convey, where appropriate, how certain wines are particularly good, or particularly bad, at expressing their underlying terroir."

I would have to agree with Monsieur Burghound on this point. A wine stripped of its so-called terroir is the kind of wine being eviscerated as "global" and by analogy, a wine that scores well, but tastes like something other than what it is supposed to taste like, proves that the monoliths care less about what a wine is supposed to taste like and more about what it actually does taste like.

Whether that is or is not important in the context of Bordeaux is my whole point. To my mind, the question is not whether the monolithic tasters get it collectively right, but whether they are monoliths at all.

The really burning issue underlying this -that has been on my mind for some time - is why the paradigm of terroir, so successfully applied in Burgundy and attempted around the world, fails in Bordeaux (and there can be no doubt that it fails in Bordeaux).

My conclusion: "Terroir," as *the* concept-paradigm of fine wine, cannot stand alone. Of course a lot is lost in translation, but in English, terroir is an abstract modifier-concept, like "good," a word that can only be used in connection with others in order for it to have any meaning. It is not even an abstract solo-concept, like "red." It is simply an abstract concept, and not even a particularly good one at that. To speak of "terroir" without at the same time speaking of not only a specific region but of a specific vineyard is an abstraction without meaning. This concept of "terroir" cannot be applied to Bordeaux because, quite simply, the vineyards are too big and the production of wine too commercial to supply the skeleton-concept which is terroir with any stuffing.

Now that said, if "terroir" is a workable concept in wine, and I think that it is, then it must be applied to Bordeaux, somehow, someway, even if that means that the Bordelais need to strip down to their underpants and rethink the whole concept of what they are doing, because right now, (with some obvious exceptions for chateaux that do produce profound wines that sing their terroir) the Bordeaux have no terroir. On the other hand, a fair argument could be made that most Bordeaux never had any terroir to begin with, and let the whole thing go at that.

Big scores, sure, the Bordelais have got scores in spades, but terroir, not so much….and what that tells me about the monolith palates is that they care very little about the kinds of wine that I care about. So does it surprise me that they all always agree – not at all. In fact, I wouldn’t expect anything less.