Electrical engineers routinely deal with signals. In their world, signals contain both information and noise – information defined as the thing your’re interested in; noise as stuff that’s irrelevant. Sometimes a signal is unsuccessful because it’s too weak, sometimes because it’s masked by noise.
A wine doesn’t have to be very expensive or rare to exhibit this quality. During the years that I was writing exclusively about inexpensive wines, I found a surprising number of ten or twelve dollar things that successfully signaled their regional identities: a real accomplishment in my book.
I would argue that the ability to emit a recognizable signal of this kind is one benchmark of quality in wine whatever its price. This is because in order to generate a readable signal there needs to be a certain degree of concentration, which generally means lowered yields in the vineyard. It also means that wine needs to be healthy, since dirty or brett-tainted wines create noise.
Then there’s the anecdote about a connoisseur of the last century who was the object of some friendly mischief when the group he habitually tasted with challenged him to identify the villages from which each of a flight of Burgundy was sourced. One wine had been concocted by blending one of the village wines with a bit of Bordeaux. The expert correctly identified each of the true wines, then, pointing to the odd man out pronounced Ce vin n’existe pas! (This wine does not exist!). The expert couldn’t match the signal with any known referent. To him, it was gibberish – a nonsense wine.
It’s a droll story, but makes an important point. In order for a signal to be meaningful, it needs to actually communicate something intelligible. Not all wines are capable of this – though in saying so we may be letting vineyards off the hook. Not all sites have terroir to communicate.
Wines can also fail to communicate because someone has manipulated them into a state that makes them inherently noisy. Overly concentrated wines or those that have been enriched with an extended soak in new oak make it hard to judge whether they come from Tuscany or Napa Valley. The signal can’t be clearly read. This is one reason why winemakers with a real concern to allow their wines to reflect terroir are concerned not to overwork them in the cellar.
There’s a sense in which all we can know of terroir is how it expresses itself in particular wines. The hypothesis that something exists which is anterior to, more durable and somehow more real than the wine we make and consume from year to year is not susceptible to direct examination – let alone proof. It’s a state of affairs that should make us shrink from grand statements about whose wine is a more perfect expression of a particular terroir.
Having this view doesn’t make me a terroir denier, I hope – maybe just a little skeptical of some of the sweeping claims made for it.