Description: Blog Your Wine Community
Very loosely translated from French (since no-one can agree on the exact definition, and there is no English equivalent), terroir means “a sense of place”. It’s applied by wine nerds to talk about all the things that have an effect on the grapes in a vineyard. So the weather, the soil, hours of sunlight, the slope of the hill where vines are planted, the macro climate of the region as a whole, right down to the micro-climate in the individual rows of grapes.
Of course, this is based on the fact that every vineyard in the world has its own individual “terroir”. So the question is: Does each parcel of land, within each vineyard, within each region, within each country, really produce wines that taste completely unique from other surrounding vineyards? The answer is: Potentially, yes; realistically, no.
European winemakers take the aspect of terroir very seriously; for example, wine from a Grand Cru vineyard in Burgundy will cost a ridiculous amount more than a Premier Cru vineyard, even though the two plots of land can be literally feet away from each other, and made by the same winemaker. But, maybe the Grand Cru site has better drainage, more pronounced minerality in the soil, or gains that extra little touch of sunlight every day because of the slope of the hill etc.