A domaine’s lengthy historical past hoists its inanimate wines into life; biography brings that means to the easy sensual pleasure of tasting a grower’s efforts. It’s necessary, although, to know what we’re doing after we inform tales. And to know what to inform them about.
Winemakers take the messy chaos of pure processes and add self-discipline, giving form and route to supply a secure and attractive wine. This was by no means nature’s intent. The storyteller takes a messy chaos of random occasions, both imagined or actual (with the latter, storytellers might name themselves historians), after which edits and arranges these occasions to convey connection and consequence. It’s the connection and consequence which the human thoughts craves. We derive that means and nourishment from them.
However tales aren’t actuality: they’re a crafted sample of occasions. Even historical past isn’t actuality, although the choice made by the historian could also be correct, sage and helpful. Actuality is chaotic, boring, random, capricious and so vastly intricate as to be unknowable. To attach chaotic occasions and endow them with inappropriate linear interpretation is ‘the narrative fallacy’ – a phrase related to the Lebanese-American essayist of randomness and threat Nassim Nicholas Taleb. We discover consequence and causality in every single place and mannequin our behaviour on these narrative threads, when what we ought to be doing is analyzing details and embracing complexity in an effort to minimise threat and fragility. Our tales lead us astray.
Widespread wine-world assumptions about terroir provide, I concern, a clanging instance of the narrative fallacy at work. It’s wine’s explicit fascination and declare on our consideration that high quality graduations in its sensual id are palpable – however this sensual id is the results of a fancy suite of human interactions with the surroundings. Even the wine’s creator will battle to understand each enter into that id.
What will be resumed on a label or in an article is a tiny, gestural choice. Soil usually options: a easy descriptor may consult with chemistry (‘limestone’), origin (‘volcanics’) or texture and particle measurement (‘sand’ or ‘clay’). These descriptors will in any case be a gross simplification of the ever-changing structural, chemical and microbiological realities of a selected parcel of soil, and its important potential for cation trade (an indicator of soil fertility). A date covers a complete season. We accord significance to that which is definitely measured (sunshine, rain, temperature), however to not that which may’t be (the differing impacts of clouds, winds and air actions, day lengths, mild angles, humidity). Vegetation are vastly delicate to topographical nuance, about which we frequently know little. Rootstocks are ignored or forgotten, and roots and their important mycorrhizae stay mysterious; pruning and cover are particulars too far. Style grape juice, and you’ll realise that any wine’s id is basically a present of fermentative processes, whose complicated chemistry will at all times elude the understanding of anybody however specialists. Is fermentation place-dependent in a roundabout way? We’re unsure.
Terroir just isn’t a fiction, or so our noses and mouths inform us. Good. Its secrets and techniques, then, should yield to scientific endeavour – however scientists have barely begun work on this huge and difficult subject. Till then, we must always resist the temptation to inform tales about terroir; they may lead us astray.
A glass of Chablis doesn’t style because it does due to limestone deposited in the course of the Kimmeridgian stage of the Jurassic, nor a glass of Pauillac due to Quaternary gravel: it’s much more sophisticated than that. Those that have hunted down limestone and hoped to make Chablis, or sought out gravel anticipating a brand new Pauillac, discover solely disappointment. We must always settle for – even rejoice – terroir’s complexities, its chaos of potential, its microscopic thickets of element, its lingering uncertainties, its weirdness and its magnificence. Greatest to maintain tales of trigger and consequence for the human, the place we now have grown comfy with their instructive and entertaining deformations.
In my glass this month
Two Remelluri wines – and much to consider. One (courtesy of a sort pal) was the Blanco 2007: creamy concord on the nostril, then vibrant, contemporary and sculpted on the palate. The opposite was a pattern of the superbly bottled Yjar 2017 (£104 Jeroboams), kindly despatched over by Telmo Rodríguez a couple of months earlier: pure, authoritative, concentrated, detailed, unshowy. These are aerial, Atlantic wines, Biscay-fresh. The Rioja I believed I knew, in different phrases, is proving to be one other narrative fallacy.
