In London, if you want your friends to hate you, give their dog a squeaky toy.

In Ireland, or at least in the house on the West Coast where I’m writing this, the rule does not apply. The whippet pup with whom I am sharing a sofa has a squeaky shark, a squeaky plastic hamburger, a squeaky apple and more. Is this an example of terroir, a laid-back attitude to squeakiness in a country that is certainly more laid-back than London?

How widely should we define terroir? Winemakers are certainly part of terroir: they adapt nature, and what it gives them, to their own needs. And every winemaker has a backstory, just as every vineyard does. Do the trailing roots of that backstory – the reasons why they take one decision rather than another, and work with the soil and climate in this way rather than that, also become an aspect of terroir? In which case, if you want an purer interpretation of terroir, should a winemaker be born and bred in the region they make wine? Can a winemaker from outside, bringing outside influences, offer as unadulterated an interpretation of the terroir as a native? Do winemakers from outside bring the outside with them – and is that good or not? How pure should terroir be? (Does the terroir become part of my writing when the dog puts its foot on the keypad?)

There is a definition of terroir that says it should never be adapted or changed. INAO in the past has clamped down on growers who have tried putting down plastic sheeting against rain, for example; though installing drainage or netting against hail hasn’t upset them, so it’s a bit illogical. In any case, a vineyard is man-made from the word go.

I’m aware that I could easily argue myself out of any belief in terroir; but in truth I have no difficulty in believing fervently in terroir while at the same time feeling my hackles rise whenever a winemaker claims to express their terroir perfectly in whatever wine they’ve just poured for me. Terroir, in the end and often in the beginning, is not something that anyone wants perfectly translated into wine, whatever they say. The role of a winemaker is to tailor terroir, not express every single aspect of it. Terroir is not always benevolent.

Which brings me back to my question: are winemakers native to a region more intrinsically in tune with its rhythms, its advantages and drawbacks, than those who arrive, crawl into every corner of it, find a patch they like and get hold of it? If the more purist view of terroir is true, then winemakers should not arrive from outside. (Nor should oak barrels, which is another matter.) In which case every admiring piece ever written about the revivifying effect of incomers might need revision. I’m thinking, to take a couple of Spanish regions at random, of Gredos, where shaggy-haired winemakers in search of ancient vines arrived and started making Garnacha of radical purity and lightness from 1999 onwards, and haven’t stopped since, on the way making a neglected, run-down region fashionable, desirable and expensive; and Toro, where more neatly barbered types, often from international corporations, have moved in, found potential in its old vines and high, hot vineyards and are busy making wines that are trying to give a new, and equally radical, interpretation of that terroir. In the second instance there is certainly an element of what one might euphemistically call learning to work with a challenging terroir, rather than acting as a mouthpiece for it pure and simple. But the wines are good.

To go back rather further, the Cistercians who founded many famous European vineyards always came from somewhere else to build their monasteries: they were the corporate multinationals of their day, to borrow a phrase from historian Dr Rachel Moss of Trinity College Dublin. More recently, the terroir of the Médoc derived from the skills of Dutch drainage engineers. But in the Douro, before phylloxera, myriad small farmers planted tiny plots of vines on every available patch of earth; and David Guimaraens of Fonseca told me once that he believes they chose the position of each vine in each mixed vineyard according to where it would do best. It was not random, he thinks. Did this planting by people with deep roots in the region offer a better expression of terroir than the World Bank-funded planting of just five varieties in separate engineered blocks that took over in the 1980s?

(I have put the laptop on top of the dog. This is my way of adapting to the terroir, and so far it’s working.)

Winemakers all bring themselves and what has made them themselves; they all have baggage. Their roots are in particular places – where they did their degree, where they worked a vintage or two, where they unlearnt what they had been taught in order to start learning again. All this they add to the terroir via every decision they make. Cheese guru Bronwen Percival says that if you’re a cheese producer and you want to make a Comté-style cheese, get in a Comté cheesemaker. But don’t let them anywhere near your Camembert style.

Winemakers, left to themselves, will gravitate towards the places where they feel most comfortable –where they suit the terroir, if you like. Ideally there is then a symbiotic relationship between winemaker and place, with both bringing something to the party. It’s rather like the introduction of a vine from elsewhere that suddenly gives a place its voice: think of Cabernet Sauvignon in Margaret River, or Chenin Blanc in the Swartland. Or indeed Cabernet Sauvignon in Pauillac, since it doesn’t seem to have existed until the 17th century, so was very much a new introduction. Or Riesling in the Rhine, when it first spread widely there in the Middle Ages. Bringing in outsiders, be they human or vegetable, can be revelatory.

Vines have always moved around, and wines even more so. The terroir of any given region depends on travel, trade and politics; terroir is not static. It depends on outside influences to keep it alive. Climate change favours some terroirs and not others; economic policies determined hundreds of miles away favour one market over another, and the tastes of that market determine what is grown, and how. The terroirs of Bordeaux, the Douro and Burgundy all developed in the way they did because of decisions elsewhere. (Would Pinot Noir be such a part of the Côte d’Or if the rich Burgundian court hadn’t demanded it?) If the winemaker is part of the terroir, might not world economics and politics play a part too? How wide do we allow influences to be?

Winemakers don’t get cloned in the way that vines do but they do pass on their knowledge. That too becomes embedded in the terroir, and that too can become lost as times and fashions change. Think of the old ways of viticulture that are being rediscovered after they fell from favour in the era of industrial production. Those industrial techniques seemed revelatory at first – and one has to be honest and say that they suited the times, which required cheap wines in quantity after World War Two.

The dog is now lying behind me on the sofa, squeaking its toy. The toy is made of rather pretty Irish tweed, so has an element of local terroir to it. I don’t know where the squeak was made, but as far as the dog is concerned, that squeak, probably imported, is what makes it all work.

Photo by Aleksandra on Unsplash