A Sense of Place

On terroir, and why some wines taste like nowhere else on earth

Terroir is one of those words that gets thrown around so freely it has almost lost its meaning. You see it on back labels, in tasting notes, in the marketing copy of wineries that wouldn’t know a living soil from a car park. It has become a shorthand for quality, a way of implying something special without having to explain what that something actually is.

So let’s be specific about what terroir actually means - and why it matters.

Terroir is the complete natural environment in which a wine is produced. Soil type, geology, altitude, aspect, microclimate, drainage. The slope of a hill, the way morning fog lifts off a valley, the difference between a north and a south-facing vine. But it goes deeper than that. Terroir is also the microbiological life of a place - the bacteria, the fungi, the wild yeasts that exist in that specific patch of earth and nowhere else. As we explored in the last journal, you cannot bottle a sense of place without first having a living place to bottle it from.

Which is why organic and biodynamic farming is not a lifestyle choice. It is the prerequisite for terroir expression. Farm with synthetic chemicals and you kill the invisible ecosystem that makes your land unique. What you are left with is geography without identity - a postcode, not a place.

Three regions have convinced me of this more consistently than anywhere else.

The Fenouillèdes in French Catalonia, where Le Soula farm old vines on high-altitude granite at the foot of the Pyrenees, produces whites that taste like no other white wine on earth. The combination of ancient schist and granite soils, cool mountain air, and biodynamic viticulture creates something that resists easy description - taut, mineral, alive, unmistakably itself. You cannot replicate it in another region. You cannot replicate it with another farming philosophy. The place and the practice are inseparable.

The Swartland in South Africa is another. Craig Hawkins at Testalonga has built his entire philosophy around what he calls “single grape, single soil” - the idea that terroir expression demands absolute clarity, no blending of sites, no winemaking intervention to smooth the edges. When asked why his wines don’t taste like conventional South African wine, his answer is direct: they are South African wine with a sense of place. Everything else, he suggests, is an industrialised approximation. Old bush vine Chenin from decomposed granite on the Paardeberg. Old Carignan from sandstone in the Piketberg foothills. Each wine a precise record of where it came from.

And then Burgenland in Austria - warm, flat, shaped by the vast shallow lake of Neusiedlersee - where Judith Beck farms biodynamically in Gols, working with indigenous Austrian varieties that have adapted over centuries to this specific climate and soil. Her philosophy is expressed in a single line that has stayed with me: “International style can be produced by everyone, everywhere. My wines are my own. They are here and now.” That is terroir as a declaration. A refusal to make wine that could have come from anywhere.

The common thread across all three is not geography. It is intention. Each of these producers has made the decision to get out of the way - to farm sensitively, intervene minimally, and trust that if the land is healthy and the winemaking honest, the place will speak for itself.

This is what separates terroir from marketing. Marketing tells you a wine tastes of somewhere. Terroir is when you can taste it for yourself and have no doubt.

A wine that carries genuine sense of place is one of the most extraordinary things you can put in a glass. It is the product of a specific piece of earth, a specific vintage, a specific set of decisions made by someone who understood that their job was not to make wine - but to allow a place to express itself.

You cannot fake that. You can only earn it.