Customer Reviews

The Geography of Wine: How Landscapes, Cultures, Terroir, and the Weather Make a Good Drop

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Terroir is the all-purpose French term for the land, the weather, the climate, the environment in which the wine grapes grow. It's what makes Bordeaux (the region) produce Bordeaux (the wine), Burgundy, Champagne, and Alsace likewise. American wines are labeled by the variety of grape in argument that that is the most important aspect, though Napa, Sonoma, and Russian River Valley also appear on the labels. But Pinot Noir does well in Oregon (as well as in Burgundy), as does Riesling (which does well in Germany too), but not so well other places. This book looks at how the land, the weather, and the choices of the people doing the wine making affect the wines.

It's a decent book which covers a lot of territory (literal and figurative) in a readable, non-technical manner. I've deducted a star only because this book could have been better, many times I was left with questions leading directly from the text, and the author had moved on. The coverage is thin in spots, and seems to have variations in what level of wine knowledge the reader is expected to have (in most places there's little or no assumed knowledge, but then suddenly one is expected to know quite a bit more).

The author never illustrates the mechanism by which landscape, culture, terroir, and weather supposedly influence the taste of a wine. The entire book is based on the ASSUMPTION that these things influence the taste of wine, but it provides no evidence as to how these things influence the taste of the wine.

Working on such large assumptions without any/much proof of them reminds me very much of Ellsworth Huntington's climactic determinism in Yale's geography department in the early 1900s.