THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: In Defense of Terroir
Scruton, Roger
THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE In Defense of Terroir by Roger Scruton G ROWING UP IN A LOWER MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY in mid-20th century England, I was taught to avoid wine, as one of...
...In the American market the terroiristes encounter a formidable enemy in Robert Parker, the wine critic who advertises himself on his website as “the man with the million-dollar nose...
...I was overwhelmed by the sense of this drink as the distillation of a place, a time, and a culture...
...I learned thereafter to love the wines of France, village by village, vineyard by vineyard, while retaining only the vaguest idea of the grapes used to make them, and with no standard of comparison that would tell me whether those grapes, planted in other soils and blessed by other place-names, would produce a similar flavor...
...But we should take a lesson from music...
...Locke described taste as a secondary quality...
...A honeynosed beauty on a cushion of cream...
...When I hear your words I hear sounds, but I also hear what you mean...
...Hilaire—are the guardians of vines that have acquired their character not only from the minerals that they suck from the rocks beneath them, but also from the culture and customs of a durable community...
...and wrung his hands...
...Trotanoy 1945, made from the last grapes to escape the plague of phylloxera, and which had such an improving effect on a frail constitution when drunk alone after dinner...
...Lawrence would describe it: nurse of passions, stage of dramas, and habitat of local gods...
...That bottle from which I had unfurled the loving hands contained a glinting, garnet-colored liquid, an intoxicating aroma, a subtle and many-layered flavor, but also something more precious than all of these, summarized in the ancient and inscrutable name of Trotanoy...
...Amour and St...
...But not every strawberry taste is a strawberry-tasting something...
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...Today’s classless drinkers are in search of the uniform, the reli-an emotional life of their own...
...Thanks to Nosy Parker the entire market in wine has been surbe a Nose about town, like the Nose in Gogol’s story...
...As for where the wine comes from, what does it matter so long as it has an agreeable and predictable taste...
...Every patch of blue is a blue something, if only a patch...
...Finding Desmond asleep one day in his armchair, I quietly relieved him of his treasure and was granted for the first 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007 time the indescribable experience that comes when the aroma of a great vintage wafts above the glass, and the lips tremble in anticipation, as though on the brink of a fatal kiss...
...But it is in fact not a quality at all...
...One summer I went to stay with Desmond, a witty Irishman who had read everything, slept with everyone, spent whatever he could, and was recovering in a village near Fontainebleau...
...This Portuguese brand burst on the scene, along with other breaches of English decorum, around 1963, “Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP,” as Philip Larkin famously put it (though in another connection...
...Hence tastes are both less informative and more evocative than looks, which is why it was the taste of the Madeleine, and not the sight of it, that set Proust on his train of recollection...
...THE DISPUTE BETWEEN THE GLOBAL and the local, in the matter of wine, is not a trivial matter of fashion, but is connected to some of the deepest conflicts and confusions of our time—and in particular to the conflict between those who define their loyalties in territorial terms, and those who identify with brands...
...From Plato to Hegel, philosophers have distinMAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43 THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE guished the senses of taste and smell, which provide us with sensations, from those of sight and hearing, which provide us with representations of the world...
...THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE PLEASURE of taste is a merely sensory pleasure, like that of sunlight on the skin...
...The result has been the takeover of the market by the big booze barons, who don’t depend on advertising since they have a guaranteed market share...
...It is an act of consumption that destroys its object, and which soothes and illuminates through associated thoughts and emotions, not through any meaning contained in the experience itself...
...Desmond held that such wines would be quite insulting to the medical condition of his young guest, whose untutored taste buds and anemic blood stream were clearly crying out for Beaujolais...
...In like manner a true critic, asked to describe the Maranges Ier Cru 1998 which I am now drinking, will not rabbit on about the hints of liquorice on the pallet, the faint aroma of freesias, and the deep tannins just rising from the bottom, but will reflect on the name and history of Maranges, the marshy region below the Côte d’Or, and—yes—maybe wring his hands and say “a wine like that...
...It is a dispute about wine’s place in our experience...
...Used in moderation, there is no harm in metaphors...
...These small producers were once acknowledged as national heroes, who had done more for their country’s reputation than any football team...
...By “soil” I do not mean only the physical mix of limestone, marl, clay, and humus...
...They do not come organized, so to speak, by the thoughts that they suggest...
...For a committed terroiriste, wine is the residue of human life...
...Rather than attempt to describe what a wine tastes like, therefore, we should do far better to describe its social, geographical, and cultural context...
...In savoring wine we are becoming acquainted with a spot of earth, its culture, and its way of life...
...The wines of France have been stitched like sequins to the map: Each village shines in the glass, and to every taste there belongs a terroir...
...I kept sin at bay until my first taste of Mateus Ros...
...loads of luscious fruit and big oaky flavors you could hang your knickers on”—such are by no means untypical of the outrages that winespeak inflicts on our language...
...Tastes can detach themselves from their causes, as sounds do in music, and lead an emotional life of their own...
...From the first moment of my fall, I was a terroiriste, for whom the principal ingredient in any bottle is the soil...
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...Of course, you can pretend to describe anything, even the way things taste and smell...
...What we taste in the wine is not just the fruit and its ferment, but also the peculiar flavor of a landscape to which the gods have been invited and where they have found a home...
...This has been the long work of small producers, some cultivating only an acre or two, discovering by slow and sacrificial labor exactly how to coax the soil into the fruit and the fruit into the aroma...
...I gratefully drank what was offered, and felt sorry for Desmond, that his life was so bound by dreary medicinal routines...
...But the concept of terroir has now become highly ROGER SCRUTON controversial, as more and more people from the rendered to the phony expertise of the modern oenolower middle classes follow the path to perdition that phile, which consists in writing execrable prose about I trod those 40 years ago...
...Hence the taste of a wine can linger long after the wine has disappeared down the tube...
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...Why is this...
...Still, I couldn’t help being a little curious about this bottle which Desmond would hug to himself in the library after dinner...
...We rational beings do not merely taste our drink...
...The heightened consciousness that comes to us through wine means that we seek and find features of our world that are, as it were, epitomized in its flavor...
...We savor it, and that means opening our minds and hearts to reflection, in a way that lies entirely beyond the mental repertoire of my horse Sam, even if he enjoys his wine every bit as much as I do...
...At the same time the attempt to pinpoint a taste tends to evaporate in empty metaphor...
...clarion calls of blackberries with muted undertones of horsesh...
...This is what led me, on that fatal day, towards the concept of terroir, and towards the image of wine as the distillation of a community and its gods...
...Hence the controversy sparked off by the film Mondovino, in which the terroiristes are defended against the garagistes (who gather grapes from many places, and press them in what might have been a garage...
...Desmond had interpreted this to mean first-growth clarets at dinner, and maybe second-growth at lunch...
...I mean the soil as Jean Giono, Giovanni Verga, or D.H...
...If they convey anything it is by association rather than content—and the associations can go on forever...
...Hence the tendency to classify wines in terms of the brand and the grape varietal, either ignoring the soil entirely, or including it, if at all, under some “global” characterization—not as the sacred soil of a place, but as a geological type...
...The taste can be there without the substance, as when I have a taste in the mouth, but have swallowed nothing...
...Since they are associated with, rather than inherent in, their objects, they have a facility to launch trains of association, linking object to object, and place to place, in a continuous narrative such as was famously elaborated by Marcel Proust...
...Janác.ek, asked to describe a chord which a musicologist would have called a dominant minor ninth with diminished fifth over a tonic pedal, said simply “a chord like that...
...The deities from which the villages of France take their names—whether pagan, as in Mercurey and Juliénas, or Christian, as in St...
...The taste is in the mouth in something like the way the smell is in the air or the sound is in the room...
...I was about to fall in love—not with a flavor or a plant or a drug but with a hallowed piece of France...
...901 Arlington, VA 22209 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007...
...On the other hand, savoring a wine is nothing like savoring a picture, a poem, or a symphony...
...In 1990, however, under pressure from the health fascists, the Loi Evin was passed, making it impossible for producers to advertise the merits of their wines...
...Smells and tastes are not like that...
...Poetry, history, the calendar flavors, awarding arbitrary points, and pretending to of saints, the suffering of martyrs—such things are less important to the newly flush Tastes can detach themselves from their generation of adolescents than they were to us causes, as sounds do in music, and leadlower middle-class pioneers...
...able, and the easily remembered...
...when I look at you I see shapes and colors, but I also see you, your expression, and your physical presence...
...When I tasted that fatal glass of Trotanoy, it would have been unthinkable—indeed illegal—for a French vineyard to sell its wine as “Syrah,” rather than, say, Côteaux d’Aix en Provence, Commanderie de la Bargemone...
...His doctor, he felt certain, would particularly approve of the Ch...
...I left home for Cambridge entirely convinced that the sins of the upper classes are no big deal...
...That thought was dimly intimated by my first sip of Château Trotanoy, and it is a thought that has remained with me to this day...
...But the problem with tastes is that we seem to have no other way of describing them...
...The enigmatic name, the faded label, the frail tenacious hands that closed around the bottle, all emphasized the mystery...
...Candidates accepted into the program will have regular hands-on supervision, training, and editing, and will be published in TAS and Spectator.org...
...THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE In Defense of Terroir by Roger Scruton G ROWING UP IN A LOWER MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY in mid-20th century England, I was taught to avoid wine, as one of those exotic transgressions through which the upper classes earn their place in hell...
...To learn how you can qualify to participate, write: Young Journalism Program, c/o The American Spectator 1611 North Kent St., Ste...
...Hence the dispute between the terroiristes and their opponents is not simply about the production and marketing of wine...
...Roger Scruton,the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life (Continuum...
...Desmond’s doctor had advised restraint in the matter of alcohol...
Vol. 40 • May 2007 • No. 4
