What is terroir?

Are you familiar with the french word, terroir? (Pronounced tehr-wah.) Harvey Steiman calls it "that French concept of place reflected in the glass."

In an article for Saveur, Thomas Pastuszak and Jessica Brown, husband-and-wife sommeliers at The Nomad Hotel and other top NY restaurants shared, "If we had to condense an explanation of terroir down into a single phrase, it would be 'a sense of place.' Terroir can be a complex, layered, and misunderstood topic in the wine world, but basically, it means that a wine smells and tastes of the place it was created. One of the reasons we love wine so much is that it combines location, farming, science, and art; one whiff of a wine can transport you to wherever it was made...

“Many of the greatest terroir wines cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world. Imagine two different vineyards across the globe from one another: Even if you grow the same vines (chardonnay, for example), and make wine from them the exact same way, the resulting wines will ultimately be different. The soils and growing conditions of certain vineyards are so special and distinct that they simply don’t exist anywhere else in the world, resulting in wine that is quite literally singular."

Some, including Steiman, consider terroir as "the sum total of a site's constants, including soil composition, latitude, elevation, contour, sun exposure, and climate." But others include variables such as time/vintage & human practice in the notion of terroir.

For our purposes, we’ll go with the looser definition…

Terroir - the soil, climate, & human practice that makes a bottle of wine unique & unrepeatable; the taste of a specific place and time on the earth.

This sense of place is one of the key traits missing from most of the cookie-cutter places we make these days. So the question becomes:

How can we make places that are unique & unrepeatable, embodying the best of a specific place and time on the earth?

(Terroir is derived from the Old French word tieroir meaning land. Not to be confused with terror, from the word terreur, an unrelated Old French word, meaning extreme fear.)