Regional stereotypes and the origin of the concept of Terroir

Terroir is an old concept in France, however it hasn’t always had quite the meaning to which we now ascribe it.

In its early usage it referred to merely the soil of an area of the country, by the 13^thcentury it was being used to refer to more specifically physical properties of areas of the land, the soils properties, it’s drainage, fertility etc.

By the 1700’s its usage had come to include a sense of the soul of the person who had tended the land. Remember this is wholly in keeping with Christian teaching regarding property and work in that a person puts his god given energy into working the land, and in turn derives a portion of ownership of said land or crafted item.

During the 1800’s it was common practice in France to link the health and vitality of a person to the land in which they lived, the food upon which they ate and the work that they undertook. Thus people identified themselves with their regions and felt no qualms attributing negative qualities to ‘foreign’ regions of the country.

Wine and food were divine products of the French genius and only through their consumption and celebration could the French truly express to their full potential.

Where this story starts to become interesting is in how the small vignerons started to use it to they advantage.

After the French revolution the large monastic estates were sold off to the public, this wasn’t quite as much of an egalitarian land redistribution as could have been hoped, as the new aristocracy of those who had prospered under the revolution promptly bought up many of the large estates. They then commenced to make large scale wines with the blended fruit.

It was the smaller vigneron who merely had his patch of land who had the most to gain from asserting the primacy of his patch. By tirelessly working his land, he gave himself the opportunity to compete, at least qualitatively with the larger growers and nouvelle aristocracy.

Until the point where individual plots of land were more than just smaller sections of a larger estate, the vignerons were essentially interchangeable. The rise of terroir changed all this, albeit only for the lucky few.

What is McDonalds actually implied that Ronald had invented the Burger?

1821: A French Monk in the region of Champagne was looking to improve upon the standing of the Catholic Church in the region. His name was Dom Grossart, he wrote to the deputy mayor of the town of Ay, stating that, ‘as you know Monsiour…… it was the celebrated Dom Perignon….. who found the secret of making white sparkling wine’

This is the first record of Dom Perignon’s existence, anything that may have been recorded as to his presence or otherwise at the monastery was destroyed when the monastery was sacked during the revolution. Sacked with good reason as well, it seems that they didn’t regard their lay peasantry with quite the same grace or regard as their monastic brothers. The peasantry around Hautvilliers was reputed to be ‘more wretched and poor than anywhere else’.

Over the following half a decade, mentions of Dom Perignon and his miraculous discovery multiply. Reaching a point by the 1860’s where it was a semi accepted fact. Hautvilliers was rebuilt and people were shown around, what they were now being told was the original cellar and press that Dom Perignon had used.

Nearly 200 years of repetition has given the story a sheen of truthfulness. This isn’t quite the same as it being true though.

My question is; If the good folk at Moet & Chandon (LVMH) who market Dom Perignon, and fill their marketing literature with stories of Dom Perignon’s genius are aware of his fictional status. Then are they guilty of false advertising?

Putting it in another way, we are no longer allowed to make spurious health claims when we sell products, though to be truthful  many people still do, so why is it that bogus historical origin stories are accepted without much question.

I might as well start claiming that Ronald McDonald invented the beef burger, or that the earth was created in 6 days…. though, thinking about it, maybe that’s why we’re so forgiving of these lies. Constant repetition has robbed them of their ante natal maliciousness and furnished them with a patina of tradition and sheen of glossy romanticism.

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In response to several comments, I'm going to be returning to these pages, so I will be putting up the tumblr posts back here..

Open letter to the Guardian

Dear Editor

Please can we discuss wine?

At present the coverage that your paper devotes to wine and drink pales in the anaemic slightly bulimic self-hating shadow of your exemplary food coverage.

With the formation of the creative locus that is the Word of Mouth blog space the Guardian has placed itself firmly at the forefront of the extremely fruitful movement that is food writing in Britain at the moment.

By comparison the coverage given to wine and beverage related journalism is curiously (willfully?) sparse to non-existent.

Whilst I appreciate that this can be attributed to a more general malaise in the field of wine related print journalism. I still can’t help but cringe when I see how sparse the space given to Fiona Beckett is every Saturday.

If this wasn’t quite enough, there is the issue of the wine related articles that receive main billing, either on the front page of the print edition or on the opening page of the website. It seems that it is here that underlying prejudices come to the fore.

In the last few months the articles that have caught my (admittedly slightly limited, I read the paper on line every day and buy it about 3 times a week) attention as being promoted by the editorship have been quite saddening.

Malcolm Gluck’s recent diatribe against English wines was one such example. I understand that you were once at the forefront of supermarket recommendations with his Super Plonk column, but times have changed. His piece came loaded with half with slander and half with unattributed quotes from ‘New Zealand wine making friends’ who tried growing Pinot Noir only to reckon it was only good for vinegar. This might pass muster in investigative journalism as protection of a source, but in wine writing it comes across as hearsay. That, the rest of the article was bare faced self-promotion of his tired brand of ‘wine radical’ almost slipped by such was the saddening sight of his despairing attempts to remain relevant as an anti-critic.

We move to the highly placed reportage of the Edinburgh university study that demonstrated how a limited sample of people preferred the taste of one or other cheap wine over another less cheap wine.

The Guardian newspaper employs the services of the esteemed Dr Ben Goldacre (for which I am most grateful). It is this sort of uncritical parroting of jumped to conclusions that are unsupported by the evidence that I expect to see him eviscerating, though not usually in the Guardian’s own coverage.

Finally, and most recently, there was a fluff piece on the recovery of the global market for cork that read like a barely edited PR mailshot from Amorim. I’m sure you’ll agree that the hard work the moderator had to do on the comments was testament to at least some latent desire for wine related reporting that matches the high standard set elsewhere in the paper.

I’ve long wondered whether the refusal to engage with wine and drink issues in a serious fashion was born out of the papers leftist values, which, I am proud to share.

I feel that a renewed focus on wine is not necessarily in conflict with these, as, save for the richest and most prestigious of appellations, wine is one of the few products were it is incredibly easy to track the path of one’s money right back to the end producer. Who, in many cases are still to be found with hands dirty from their own vineyards. However, in the absence of a guide of where to find these wines, we are left with an increasingly homogenized market selection of major corporations’ offerings.

I am certain that it wouldn’t be too far from the paper’s current editorial remit to increase the scope of the Word of Mouth blog space to include a few of the younger wine blogger and wine writers to contribute to what is already the preeminent space for discussion of food in the UK media.

Yours Sincerely

Donald Edwards

p.s Hoping for the best.

Le Nord, 18 Rue Neuve, Lyon

I love France, I love French food and I've eaten a reasonable amount of it, both in France and elsewhere.

I also worked for several years at Le Bouchon Breton, so finding out that I was to have a free evening in Lyon meant that there wasn't much dithering over what to do.

Having asked the lovely Sophie Senty for a recommendation we made our way to Le Nord, 18 Rue Neuve. My initial impressions were that this was exactly what I'd been looking for, crisp white table cloths, though with the white paper square the French are so keen on. Well so far, so French.

We arrived at about ten past six, and obviously they weren't open until seven, so far, so French.

Still a couple of demi pressions later (Meteor) we returned to dine.

Now up till this point we'd only spoken to the maitre d' in French, however a charming waitress who spoke perfect English was dispatched to our table with two English menus.

Now, there's a poetry to food names, terrine de foie gras sounds much better than duck liver pate, but this is a minor gripe, preferring escargots to snails? Pretentious? Moi?

@Grape_Escape suggested a couple of Kirs to whet the palette and a excellent suggestion it was indeed.

I plumped for seven escargots a la bourgogne followed by foie de veaux with pomme puree while @Grape_Escape took the terrine de foie gras then the poulet de bresse with sauce forestier.

The wine list frustratingly didn't list any vintages, so despite our previous decision to go for a Northern Rhone there was still a degree of to and froing as we tried to find something we wanted. Eventually we decided on Jann Chave's Crozes Hermitage 09 (it might have had a lieu dit name too) and I grabbed a glass of pleasantly non descript Macon Village to accompany the snails.

We'd already been given a small bowl of the hard green olives I'm seeing around a lot at the moment, but I had to ask for bread, which then arrived feeling suspiciously pre cut, odder still was that it arrived with no butter or oil. On prompting we were given a lovely little plate of Beurre Grand Cru, and excellent butter it was, with that slight sourness I like in French butter, and a pleasingly inconsistent texture that spoke of small scale or hand churning.

@Grape_Escape's terrine de foie gras was a touch on the cold side (fridge temperature) and arrived with an edge of diced muscat jelly and some strawberry confiture. However, he declared the texture excellent, and indeed when I had a small piece it had the palette coating lustre that I would expect. I found the strawberry confiture a bit laboured and though that it dominated the palette a little.

My snails came in dinkly little individual white porcelain pots in a melted butter filled flat bottomed bowl. The little pots were topped with mini circular crouton lids and the dish slunk to the table in a languid fug of garlic, butter and parsley. Checking under the little breaded lids found some gloriously plump and flavoursome snails, being a little bit picky I wasn't overwhelmed by the amount of bread crumbs that came in the pots, but this was a tiny little gripe.

@Grape_Escape's main was pronounced wonderful, the chicken having oodles of flavour and the creamy mushroom sauce being a treat of sweet dense flavour that cosseted the chicken and was enjoyed all the way to end of the meal with bread dunking and wiping to finish with.

My calves liver was less successful, on ordering I was asked how I wanted it cooked, medium-rare? I asked if they were happy to go rarer, at which the waitress cheerily assured me that they'd cook it 'rose' as that was far and away the best.

It wasn't, the liver ended up being really quite chewy, it was nicely charred at the thin edge and the mash and sauce were good, but this restaurant carries the name of Paul Bocuse, and really ought to be able to do better.

A couple of coffees rounded off the meal and we set off to try and find the airport, however that's another story.

I will come back to Lyon, in fact I'm tentatively planning a weekend jaunt to fully immerse myself in dead flesh and animal fat, however I don't think Le Nord will be on the itinerary, it felt like the out post of a chefs empire that was coasting on old regard.

Vine age in marginal climates and it’s relation to hydric stress, carbohydrate retention and overall quality:

Last autumn I found myself discussing the benefits of vine age in marginal climates with the esteemed Bill Pannell, founder of Moss Wood and Picardy. It was his contention that vine age made much more of a difference in more marginal climates.

His rationale for this was that in very marginal climates the grapes are left on the vine as long as is possible, this means that we are forcing the vine to carry on working all the way until the very end of the potential growing season. Where as in warmer climates the grapes are harvested earlier, leaving the vine to spend the rest of the growing season replenishing its stores of carbohydrates.

Older vines, with a greater stem surface area (the phloem only runs around the edge of the wood, so volume is less important) and crucially greater root volume are much better placed to ride out any difficulties that might arise early on in the next growing season.

I was reminded of this whilst reading John Atkinson MW’s marvelous study of the terroir of the Cote de Nuits and its effect on wine quality.

He references Franck Wittendal’s principal component analysis that highlighted the soil structure as being the only factor of difference between GC and 1ere etc vineyards that was statistically different.

He goes on to highlight that this provides a buffer for water retention, with the limestone sub soils providing large amounts of calcium carbonate (opens up the soil) and the stony flocculated clay soils allowing for both good drainage and good water retention.

This along with the facility for high root density that is provided by the soil structure and low water density (without reaching stressful levels) means that the vines in the GC vineyards are predisposed to having larger carbohydrate stores, which in  turn allows for better floraison (flower set), which commonly occurs during periods of inclement weather in Burgundy.

Mr Atkinson then goes on to point out that a lot of the GC vineyards have slight easterly exposures that succeed in shielding the vines from excess heat or sun during the final period of the grapes maturation. Essential for the retention of the very delicate floral aromatics that characterizes the best Burgundian wines.

Firstly I can’t recommend John Atkinson MW’s article enough, it was published in the Journal of Wine research,  though was offered to Purple Pages readers free for a while. Secondly it was great to see the Esteemed Bill Pannell’s idea get some extra weight added to it, as he’s one of the most interesting and outspoken wine makers that I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with.

Is there a more repulsive phrase in the English vernacular than 'decaf spice chai latte'?

I was sitting in a coffee shop in Brighton when I over heard the order being called out. 'One decaf, spiced, chai latte'.
It upset me, I've had the pleasure of drinking quite a lot of chai over the years. From the Bangladeshi kitchen porters at Ashdown who used to brew up strong breakfast tea with black pepper, cardamon and milk in the afternoon, to the chai wallahs who stalk the streets and trains of Northern India doling out thick milky spiced shots of caffeinated goodness. Waxed paper cups scrunched up and dropped into the nearest bin (well gutter), hot days, hotter tea. Marsala chai. I'd go so far as to suggest that there's an entire society founded upon it.
And then we have 'decaf spiced chai lattes', I can think of no better example of the misappropriation of other cultures customs and then the whole sale raping them of any integrity and truthfulness.
Actually this touches on something a little deeper. The disrespect or otherwise of different cultures food traditions upon importation. Obviously there is a necessary degree of evolution that takes place when a recipe is exported. The basic ingredients may no longer be exactly the same, a little like Chinese whispers, but with food.
However, when a recipe is treated more as a signifier of the degree of cultural broadness of your marketing department, and thus is redesigned to fit into the schema of your mass reproduced coffee shop empire I stop accepting it.
It's not fucking masala chai, it's a shitty spiced and artificially sweetened tea concentrate that you add to foamed milk. Please in future refer to it as such.