So no four-footed mowers for your cover crop? I hear sheep are no good this time of year, but that goats ignore the buds? (Maybe I have that backwards… Always makes me think of the Robert Service poem, “The Ballad of Casey the Billy Goat.”)

Yes, keep the bad bugs away from the vines and the good ones eating the bad. Ladybugs seem very busy right now…

So what happens with your healthily developed cover crop b/w the rows? Do you let it naturally deplete as the rainfalls disappear? Turn it into natural fertilizer? Let the four-legged fertilizers mow it down?

I’m mostly interested in preventing the increase of alcohol that results from topping w/ wine. It seems to be *unspeakable* to consider replacing the lost water with — omigosh! — PLAIN (distilled) water, rather than wine. I see some potential issues with pH, but can someone explain what the other ‘cons’ would be? At first blush, it seems to make a lot of sense to me. (I’m talking about a situation where you already have a deep, well-extracted wine with pretty good acidity but significant alcohols, say 15% and higher.)

Thanks.

I say sometimes because while I don’t often confuse wines from these locations, sometimes I do. I have tasted red Burgundy, especially from Mercurey, that I could mistake easily for Russian River, Pinot from Central Otago that I couldn’t decide was Santa Lucia Highlands or Drouhin from Oregon, and on and on.

I make mistakes in identification, and so do many others. I have been hosting study tastings for groups working toward Court of Master Sommeliers level 3 & 4 accreditation. Some really great palates in these groups, and they also get it wrong often enough, especially when someone brings a wine to blind that they they know doesn’t taste like it is “supposed” to taste.

I’m not convinced that these wines are outliers, “exceptions that prove the rule.” The only way I can logically square this is if the “rule” that vineyard location is the most important factor in determining the character of a wine is not a rule at all. I believe we have willfully mythologized the primacy of site, perhaps as a mis-rememberance of a past that does not serve us well today. Proust be damned.

Here’s the experiment I’d love to do. Pick two sufficiently distinct clones of Pinot—my choices would be Swan and ENTAV 943. Plant them in 4-5 locations around the world. Don’t control for anything: use whatever rootstock, farming, and winemaking comprises the terroir of those locations, but ferment, age and bottle the selections separately. It would be useful to finish the bottles under screw cap and store them in a single location to at least take that variability out of the trial.

Accumulate bottles over 3-4 vintages, then have a grand tasting by a trained panel scoring for a standard set of descriptors. Run stats on the results. The outcome I expect would be that the sum of site+clone explains 50%-60% of the variance, but that site and clone account for roughly equal amounts of the variance. Only if the differences in clone explained less than half the variance in the data set as differences in site would I consider my hypothesis falsified.

Tyler

It’s good to see Andy Erickson talking about the “people aspects of terroir.” Echoes Seth Long’s list of things that matter in an earlier comment. Thanks for the link!

If that were a single data point it still would be nearly be QED in my mind, but wait there’s more. For example, in my experience clone 115 tastes pretty similar across sites, but to me 667 and 114 do not at all. Wente clone Chard tastes similar to me regardless where it comes from in California. Clone 548 chard tastes more different to me depending on where it comes from, but never tastes at all like Wente clone (within reason—Chard is still Chard, as Pinot is almost always Pinot).

What do you think of the hypothesis that the more marginal the site, the more exaggerated these clonal differences are? That some clones are genetically predisposed to outperform others in more extreme environments? I’ve made a modest set of observations that suggests this might be true, contradicting the earlier statement by Jerry Murray. I am open to the suggestion that all bets are off once a site is so marginal that no clone of the variety in question will do well.

Finally, what are your thoughts on my central thesis: that soil and weather are only the be-all, end-all of differentiating between wines when we, as winegrowers, make conscious decisions and take concerted actions to make it so?

I think the issue could be a result of the range in clonal differences and the way we talk about clones. For example, I don’t think Dijon clones have a wide range of morphological or taste differences and yet we speak of 667 and 777 as if it is a titanic shift. In this case I think site would certainly trump clone.

However if we spoke of clone 4 Chardonnay versus Wente we may have a different story. Two clones that at the same site show tremendous morphological and taste differences that it would be more difficult to determine how a change in site impacts the already wide discrepancies in clone. Clone 4 Chardonnay is one of the few clones I’ve worked with where there does seem to be a heavy dose of “cloneness” independent of site. Though even in those cases site impacts sugar accumulation rate, TAs at harvest, etc.

Terroir expression in my opinion is essentially a plants physiological response to its environment (that’s what makes wine so cool, we get to taste that’s plants responses!). Clonal differences can represent somewhat significant genetic differences that could lead to different physiological responses to the same stimuli. However I still would weight the basic physiology of “vine” as greater than small genetic changes of “clone” in influencing how a wine ultimately tastes.

Make any sense? Either way you have me thinking a bit differently about the issue and I appreciate that.

Tyler