Remember Z Cavariccis? I laid down 70 bucks for my first pair and wore them all through the winter of ‘91 matched with uber-trendy Birkenstocks…with socks. There was a hot guy at school who owned a pair for every day of the week and I had such a crush! Please tell me it wasn’t just a Fresno thing. Trends are powerful; somehow wearing balloon pants with tight ankles seemed like such a good idea then. Clothing trends are the easiest to spot and single out for ridicule, but trends in wine are fairly obvious too. White Zin (still hanging on in my hometown – FresYES!) was a good one, “The Movie” made Pinot the hot ticket, and animals on labels, be they hopping, dancing, or…screaming, are all the rage. Having done a fair bit of wine research in the past few months, I’ve had the chance to visit a huge number of winery websites and so have taken notice of an insidious trend in the world of winery website writing.
There is a sneaky French word that has burrowed its way into the American wine lexicon, a word oft written in italics to flaunt its exotic, mysterious nature, since alas there is no true English translation. You know it well: terroir. Suddenly it’s everywhere, like those damn Cavariccis, trying to make my wine taste like dirt and wet stone and animale, whatever that is. It seems the new goal of every former CEO-turned-winemaker is to create “wines that accurately express the site”, have a “sense of place”, “mirror the terroir”! But does terroir matter? And to what extent? And further, do wines claiming to “express terroir” really do so?
I made a small, very small, batch of wine from my father’s “vineyard” outside of Fresno. I swear, I used only “traditional winemaking techniques” (another insidious linguistic trend, but for another day). A year later, the “wine” tasted like soy sauce. So, I think I’ve got this straight, Fresno tastes like something I want to dip my sushi in. Really?
