The Problem With "Terroir"

From Napa to North Carolina, when wine regions mimic one another, the word loses all meaning.

You’ve seen it on the back of wine bottles, on website homepages, you’ve heard it uttered from the mouths of winemakers—perhaps you’ve even rolled it around in your own mouth to see how it sits: terroir. It’s the poetic force that beats through the vast world of wine, unifying hemispheres by defining their differences. It’s responsible for causing swarms of people to fall in love with wine because it embodies what is quintessentially lovable about the drink: that the place where the wine grapes grew, and what happened around them can be smelled, tasted, and felt.

Cue “Unique”, Beyoncé. 

There are many complex wine terms—terroir is the one whose definition has found its way across the bar, to people who don’t work in wine. These are terroir-driven wines. This grape is known for showcasing terroir. Notes of strawberry, wild herbs, and terroir. What the winemakers are trying to tell you, I think, is that this is good stuff, it’s unique stuff, and that it embodies that quintessentially lovable thing about wine (see above). But is that a guarantee?

For Chris Denesha, owner and winemaker at plēb urban winery in Asheville, North Carolina, the term isn’t always used responsibly.  “It feels like from the ground up, maybe we’ve missed the point in a lot of ways,” Denesha told me. Speaking on the status quo in North Carolina, he says,“if the point is to make something that is a true expression, where we want to be able to use the term terroir, I don’t think you can reconcile the actions with the word.” 

As the term has decorated marketing materials from Europe to California, the question seems to have become: if you don’t say terroir, is it even wine? A conversation re-emerging in Napa suggests that we’ve said it so many times, it’s lost its meaning. W. Blake Gray covered the conversation that Karen MacNeil recently started about the implications of several wineries in the Napa Valley using the same wine consultant—the wines are good, but they taste the same. Don’t they express style rather than terroir?

Terroir is about differentiation. “You wouldn’t go to Champagne and ask for Cabernet Sauvignon,” says Denesha who embraces individuality in agriculture as a way forward for North Carolina, a world away from California, where he has also worked. “What it comes down to is how you reconcile your beliefs with your actions. I don’t think a whole lot of people think about these things. Here in N.C., but also on the East Coast and in the States, it becomes a commodity. For me, it’s more existential. Why are you doing this? Why is this important?”

In the United States, we have a habit of using the word terroir and then immediately contradicting ourselves by presenting a bottle that does its best to imitate the closest famous wine region that guests will (hopefully) know and recognize. Denesha agrees that we do it in North Carolina. “Just look at the tags people use: the Napa of the South, the Tuscany of the Yadkin. I do think that our industry as a whole is very much dedicated to mimicry. If anything, I think people see being unique as a bad thing.” 

If a guest asks for a California red, as a server, I know what they want: a big, bold, red wine. In the city where I once worked, it also means they want a little residual sugar, though they’ll say they want it dry as they come. Anyone who works in a consumer-facing role knows that what guests ask for and what they want often contradict each other, and it’s our job to translate. Messaging around wine is complicated, and there are many obstacles: complex science, gatekeeping, and under-resourced staff in hospitality are just a few. 

What most average consumers don’t know when they ask for a California red is that what they’re actually asking for is a style, rather than a region. The big, bold red craze was a fashionable moment that came out of Napa proving that its wine is comparable to Bordeaux in order to find an international stage. And it worked—today the region can claim Cabernet worth a million bucks, literally. And many U.S. wine regions that haven’t yet made a name for themselves are in turn imitating Napa to spark a sense of recognition in their audience. That means planting grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. 

Hey—you can’t grow what you can’t sell. 

In North Carolina, Cabernet and Chardonnay are the two most widely planted non-native grapes. But they aren’t suited to the humidity, the rain, or the short growing season here. These grapes aren’t going to taste the same as their French or even Californian counterparts, and so winemakers have to make adjustments in the cellar to fit the expectations of consumers. Exit terroir, stage right. 

North Carolina can make great wine, but it won’t if we, as consumers, ask it to be Napa, Bordeaux, or any other place we already know and love—instead, we need to be open to loving something we didn’t know was possible. Denesha’s desired path for North Carolina to grow as a wine scene is to start small. “So you don’t go, oh shit: we found an audience and 2% gets it, but we need 50% of the population to buy the wine. Now I have to make drastic cuts that compromise quality and I’ll end up making ethical compromises that are hard to back away from once you reach a certain point.” 

Denesha makes wine that deviates from the norm in the rest of the state. He’s committed to growing organically, and that means that Cabernet and Chardonnay are out, and hybrids and native grapes are in. “Individuality in agriculture is important for diversity as much as anything,” Denesha says. “If nothing else, I use that word for the sake of us surviving. But also with that individuality of allowing everyone to have their own expression, it opens the door for progress.” 

Wine is variable, it just is. The irony is that we’ve come to love this fact of wine in theory, while rejecting it in practice and in doing so, may have stunted the growth of the wine regions closest to us. As consumers living in a winegrowing state, I think it’s important to get curious about the work happening in our backyard, and being willing to buy into what’s unfamiliar. There is terroir here, but what it tastes like is something you haven’t yet conceived. Aren’t you curious about what that is?