Mental Geography

by Andy Neather
It felt mildly embarrassing. A member of the team from Black Chalk was trying to explain to me exactly where their Hampshire vineyard was as we sipped the fine, precise...

The Clay Sea

by John Atkinson MW
In discussions of terroir rocks have exalted status. The journey downwards through the geological record is mostly a search for hard boundaries – chalk, basalt, slate – while the overlying...

Cutting Through The Babble

by Margaret Rand
It struck me, watching Katya Kabanova at Glyndebourne this last summer, that opera has terroir. It also has directors, who fulfil the same role as winemakers, either expressing the terroir...

Wine’s Invisible Cities

by Tom Hewson
Nested in the discussion of “Big” versus “Small” Champagne is an interesting question I saw posed by Oregon winemaker Jason Lett of Eyrie vineyards: “Is the Traditional Method antithetical to...

Luxury Bandits

by John Atkinson MW
Many qualifications have rocks and reefs rousing calm surfaces. Learner drivers are undone by parallel parking. Philosophy undergraduates discover The Spice-Box of Life isn’t a primer for formal logic. The...

The Pursuit Of Subtlety

by Dwight Furrow
If consumers cannot taste “terroir” should the wine world put so much value on place of origin? Margaret Rand raised the issue, on this very site, in an article titled...

Remaking Burgundy

by John Atkinson MW
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the...