Terroir and a Sense of Place

Again with the wine?  Yes. Again with the wine and, as I've noted before, it's essentially ground-up manifestations. I'm not even a big wine drinker. That is, not nearly as much as Ben MacPhee-Sigurdson of the Winnipeg Free Press. Having clarified, nosed, palated and, in all likelyhood, finished over 2,000 wines last year; this guy loves his vino!

Encouraging readers to "Taste the Place," MacPhee-Sigurdson suggests that one characteristic helping a wine to "stand out from the rest is a sense of place." Wine enthusiasts call it terroir, he explains. This is "a French word that strives to encompass soil, climate, geography and everything else about the land and the place that makes a wine taste the way it does."

I agree. Certainly all the biological elements that go into growing the grapes and making the wine no doubt have an impact on one sip's terroir compared to another. But this isn't sense of place. It may be a small point of distinction, but having seen how widely, and often wrongly, people use the term "sense of place," this is but another example.

Sense of place is a cognitive/emotional perception. Terroir, a far more apt term for wines, etc., is a more gustatory term dealing with the flavors, smells, aftertastes, and even colors associated with a wine.

It is when we think about or experience terroir that a sense of place is evoked. Though closely related, I would argue that they are different. One is simply the sensual story (e.g. from the senses) that we tell about the other, so to speak. When evaluating a wine on aspects of terroir, we create a sense-making story in the mind, as the left-brain Interpreter is apt to do, and use that story as an explanatory mechanism to weave both the known (intellectual) and the experienced (corporeal) information together into an integrated whole.

When MacPhee-Sigurdson asks "What does terroir taste like?" He explains that it has often been associated with European wines: "the flintiness of German Riesling, the earthy notes in a Spanish Rioja, the lean, focused fruit of an Italian Sangiovese or the delicate mushroom and forest-floor components of a French red Burgundy."

Right. And it is in combining the historical knowledge of where a wine (or any of the many food/drink examples one could fit into this equation) comes from with the first-order experiential  knowledge of flavor, smell, texture, etc. that contributes to the affective, metaphorical sense of place one develops in the final evaluation.

But this is just one man's interpretation. And I just woke up. So, please, feel free to disagree. I would love to hear different ideas on these concepts/terms.