The Case for the Grower

Now the other side, also at its strongest.

The strongest version is not that terroir is a marketing invention. It plainly is not; the previous chapter is difficult to answer. It is that the ground is nothing like sufficient, and that the variation people attribute to hillsides is routinely smaller than the variation caused by the person farming them.

Start with the fact that ought to end the conversation and somehow never does.

The same grand cru has been sold, within a single human lifetime, as thin dilute wine that nobody now defends, and as some of the finest bottles produced anywhere on earth.

The vineyard did not change. The boundaries are the same, the rock is the same, the aspect is the same. Through the 1970s a great many celebrated parcels were farmed hard for yield, fertilised heavily, picked early and made carelessly, and the wine was exactly what that implies. The same parcels now, under owners farming them differently, produce wine of a completely different order.

A purely geological account has no room for this. If the hillside were deciding, the wine could not have moved that far while the hillside stood still.

Second, the market.

This is the argument that settles most actual purchases, and it is worth stating without euphemism. A village Meursault from certain addresses costs more than grand cru from others. A Bourgogne rouge from a handful of domaines costs more than premier cru from many. Everybody in the trade knows which ones, nobody finds it surprising, and the prices have held for decades.

That is a price signal about hands rather than hectares, generated by people spending their own money, repeated across thousands of transactions a year. The market resolved this question some time ago and it resolved it in favour of the grower.

Third, Germany, which the previous book set up precisely for this moment.

Centuries of pinot noir on the Ahr's slate and Baden's slopes, producing wine nobody outside the country sought out. Then twenty years of lower yields, better plant material and growers who had trained in Burgundy, and the country became a serious producer of the grape.

Nothing about the ground was different. The entire change is attributable to decisions.

So what is the shape of the answer?

The ground sets a ceiling. The grower determines how close the wine gets to it.

That formulation accommodates both bodies of evidence without contradiction, and it also makes a prediction that turns out to be correct: the gap between a good grower and a poor one on the same ground is usually larger than the gap between good ground and ordinary ground under the same grower.

And now the honest weakness on this side, which is exactly symmetrical to the one on the other.

No grower has ever escaped their vineyard.

If it were all hands, somebody would by now have made grand cru quality wine from régionale ground. The incentive is enormous: the land costs a fraction as much and the wine would sell for many times more. Some of the most talented winemakers of the last fifty years have farmed both, on the same estate, with the same philosophy and the same care.

Every one of them has a hierarchy inside their own range, and it tracks the classification of their own holdings fairly closely.

Those growers have every commercial reason to flatten that difference and none of them can. The ceiling is real, and it is real even for the people who get closest to it.