Terroirs are important.

If you've bounced around wines for awhile the term 'terroirs' has probably come up. Last Christmas my daughter gave me a beautiful book titled Great Wine Terroirs. As I flipped through the book a photo caught my eye. It was a vineyard in the Rhone Terraces. The vines, untrellised, were growing out of a bed of rocks.

What I learned later is that the rocks slowly give off their warmth at night keeping the roots warm. OK that's positive for what looked like an impossible condition.

But the idea with terroirs is to understand how the soils, terrain, orientation of slopes, contributes to the quality of the grape and subsequently the wine.

A nice proof of this value is described on page 155 of this book discussing Cabernet Sauvignon.

"Regardless of the terrain or climate, most Cabernet Sauvignon wines have an unmistakable aroma of bell peppers that may be more or less marked. This aroma, known to botanists as aristolochia and to chemists as pyrazine, is comon to all grapes in this family (the Merlot, Cabernet Franc, etc.) but it is always pronounced in the Cabernet Sauvignon."

But this pepper aroma changes to "ripe black currants, cedar spices and sometimes licorice" when grown in the gravel terraces of Gironde and Medoc.



So when selecting grapes to be grown in a particular region it is very important to understand what effect the 'terroir' will have.