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.

Deep Roots on The Frozen Tundra

In this week's Isthmus, Madison's alt-weekly newspaper, it is all about the Packers. The article and its various sidebars, diagrams, and other accoutrements, written by sports guy Jason Joyce, includes commentary by UW-Madison Scandinavian Studies professor James Leary.

Vince Lombardi & Jerry Kramer, 1962

Leary states that "our sense of place in Wisconsin" is represented, in a way, by the citizenry's deep and abiding love for the only publicly-owned team in the National Football League, The Pack.

Take a nostalgic trip to Packerville, why don'tcha.

There does seem to be a very deep relationship between the team and its fans. For good reason, I suppose. The team has been publicly owned since 1923.

Despite many ups and downs in the franchise history, those are some pretty deep roots. Sure, all home-state or city fans have a love for "their team."

As Leary says, "The root-for-the-home-team stance is a ubiquitous sports phenomenon." In Wisconsin, however, when fans say it's "our" team, they mean it.

Bubba

"...because we're from Wisconsin," Leary says, "we have a special relationship with our state and, by extension with our state's team."  No doubt.

I'm not a strident football fan, but it is fun to watch great athletes at any game. So for now, for this upcoming playoff game at GB takes on the NY Giants, I'll get on the wagon: Go, Pack, Go!
 

A Culinary Sense of Place

Certain beverages are closely tied to a particular place. Due to their earthly provenance, wine and whiskey come to mind. Certain foods are also intimately connected to places. One specialty item that ranks high on the list of local favorites in nearby Milwaukee, aside from beer and cheese, are brats. Sandy D'Amato, The Kitchen Technician, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is a traveling food connoisseur.

Most popular food travel destinations, from Lonely Plant blog

As a chef, D'Amato is always on the look out for what makes any given city or location "culinarily unique." Citing examples of "fried clams and lobster in Maine, po' boys in New Orleans or Key lime pie in Florida," D'Amato wants food that "provides a sense of place."

His story reminds me that I don't get to Milwaukee, or anywhere else, often enough!

There are many specialty dishes associated with very specific locations. What are your favorite place/flavor combinations?  Please leave a comment if you can think of some good examples!

It seems that the combination of fantastic cuisine and unique locations is a bustling industry. Just last month, the Lonely Planet blog listed its reader-generated Top 10 of food/travel destinations. They even created a neat little wordle from the results, as seen above. There is a magazine called Food and Travel. And a food and travel blog (unrelated to the mag., as far as I can tell). In June, 2010, Budget Travel let readers know where some of the best street foods are around the world. For writers, combining "travel writing" with food reviews seems like a great niche. Good work, as they say, if you can get it.

Memories of travel and tastes that stand out for me are a certain coffee in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, a Jaeger Schnitzel I once had in a German village somewhere near Bitburg, and fresh caught walleye from the wilds of Northwest Ontario. How about you?

Memorable Places of 2011

In thinking about some of my favorite places of the past year, it occurs to me that I did not travel very much. The Big Trip of the year was a late June jaunt up to Ontario, Canada, out in The Bush just west of Kakabeka Falls (yes, the Niagra of the North). It was a great trip, and a wonderful place to visit. I hope to return in 2012 to do a little more fishing and relaxing and a little less studying.

Not long after that trip, in the first week of August, I took a mental trip into the land of preliminary/qualifying exams. Social Influence & Social Norms; Knowledge and Trust in Risk Communication; the role of Place in Environmental Communication; Qualitative Methodology; and Social Networks & Network Theory. What a trip! I had a mental hangover for weeks, maybe still do.

My daughter and I took several trips out to a favorite county park about 18 miles into the edge of the Driftless Zone just west/northwest of Madison. Many picnics were packed. Berries were picked, birds sighted, and fun was had. This was my (our) most frequent trip out of town. In 2012 I hope to explore a few more of the small county parks around the area. Pheasant Branch Conservancy and Stewart Lake down by Mount Horeb are tops on the travel to-do list. These are oft-overlooked geographical gems well worth seeking out.

I only made a few trips back to SE Minnesota to visit family. These trips generally go via State Highway 14, a winding and scenic route traveling west/northwest along the northern edge of Driftless country. It passes through the Wisconsin River valley by Spring Green (the famous, and infamous, home to Frank Lloyd Wright), the beautiful yet much smaller Kickapoo River valley, up and over the ridges through the burgeoning hippie/sustainable/greentelligentsia hamlet of Viroqua and down again through Coon Valley before once more up and over into the great Mississippi River valley at LaCrosse. From there we cross over into Minnesota and either take Highway 16 up the Root River valley to Rushford or follow the Great River upstream to Rollingstone, just outside of Winona.

On the last trip, just a few weeks ago, we saw many big birds along the still-open waters of the Mississippi. At least a dozen bald eagle, some snow geese (I think), and a possible golden eagle. It is a recurring challenge to watch for birds (my eyes were wide for any snowy owls that might appear, as they have had an irruption into the Upper Midwest this fall/winter) and to drive. But I do a pretty good job and almost never go very far off the road.

Having recently watched the National Parks documentary series originally aired on PBS, I am anxious to visit many of the wonderful parks out West. There are many places to go and, for most of us, not nearly enough resources to make all those travels happen. The key, I think, is to enjoy where you are -- wherever you are -- and be happy with the company you keep. Either that or just keep on truckin'.

Holiday Places

There is an old barn in central Wisconsin that smells of wood smoke and sprigs of spruce. Myriad native and exotic farm animals roam the grounds freely. Be careful where you step. Six inches of snow and a slight wind under a sunny December sky make for a perfect family get-together. Even an imperfect memory can create a lasting impression such as this. I've been fortunate enough to visit this place a number of times with family and friends. It has made an enduring holiday memory. 

What are your special holiday places? Are there place-based locations that your family and/or friends like to gather during times of celebration? Perhaps it is a lake cottage on July 4th or a ridgeline looking west on while the winter solstice sun sets. The mixture of special people over the course of time creates the memories and attachments to these special places. To preserve these places and times we collect photographs, videos, and just plain old memories which, when combined with the feelings of love and closeness, offer an enduring connection to the physical spaces surrounding such interactions.

On this holiday season of 2011 I hope you all can share time and space with the people that you love. You never know when you're creating a memory in the mind of a child or a friend. Be Well and Best Wishes for a joyful and prosperous 2012.

The Topophilian Daily

I've been experimenting with a new way to aggregate my Twitter feed. What the hell am I talking about?  It's Paper.li and it affords "publication" of links, stories, and pictures of those I follow on Twitter.

For those who are not on Twitter, you can get a sense of my "information network" from that stream. See below for some of today's headlines. Paper.li updates daily and allows you to subscribe to various sources, including The Topophilian Daily!

I follow mostly media and science/environment feeds on Twitter along with a not-so-random sampling of humorists, journalists, musicians, and smarty-pants academics, philosphers, and public intellectuals. 

You can join the fun on Twitter (see @JTspartz, for example) or subscribe to The Topophilian Daily!  Thanks for checking it out. Please let me know what you think.

Brothers in the Water: The Rushford Flood of 2007.

A sense of place, almost destroyed.

A new book is out that may be overlooked by the New York Times Book Review. It will, however, resonate more deeply for many people I know than any other release this year.

Brothers in the Water: The Rushford Volunteer Fire Department and the Flood of 2007, compiled and edited by local writer Bonnie Flaig Prinsen, describes a dark night of the soul for many residents in my small SE Minnesota hometown. The Winona Daily News, the local daily paper for many in the Root River valley, covered the story extensively at the time. The Tri-County Record weekly still hosts an extensive flood photo gallery.

Many homes, businesses, and livlihoods were destroyed when Rush Creek overflowed its banks in August, 2007. Seventeen inches of rain fell in a 24 hour period. Amazingly, no human lives were lost. The disaster tore a lot of things apart. Ironically, it also brought a lot of people together. Many volunteer groups from all over the country, several from religious organizations, helped rebuild homes and, in effect, lives in the year(s) following the flood.

I haven't lived in Rushford for over 20 years. It's still "back home" for me even though I'm an outsider to any long-term resident. I remember driving up the valley, just south of town near Ferndale Golf Course, a few days after the rains stopped. The smell was potent even a couple miles away. The city streets were still covered in a putrid muck. Limited fresh water and only one outlet for food was the new normal for many, many days.

The picture below shows a house directly across the street from my parents' home. I used to shovel this driveway in winter and mow the lawn during the summer. It belonged to my kindergarten teacher. Thankfully, she wasn't home when the gas line blew.

photo credit: Jill Halverson

I have yet to read the book. I have no doubt it will evoke a lot of emotion. It will also provide a sense of closure, even four years after, for many people still struggling to regain balance in the wake of those murky waters and the difficult weeks and months following. If you visit Rushford, and I encourage anyone to do so, there are still signs of destruction but, due to the hard work of a stalwart community and despite some difficult local political wrangling, much in the way of progress has been achieved.

This video, courtesy of WKBT out of nearby La Crosse, WI, shows some floodwater footage from the area. Interviews with a few of the crew, despite the poor audio, show how it's still a tough memory to reconstruct. The video editing isn't very good but the images remain strong.



I know a few of the men who've been volunteer fire fighters in Rushford since I was just a kid. My dad was on the crew for many years and was Fire Chief for five years but retired from that position a year or so before the flood. His close friends Mike Ebner and Brad Erickson, among others, had the incredible task of coordinating the massive emergency response effort. As suggested in the above interviews, this is a story of a town saving itself. Mike doesn't give himself enough credit though. I believe his own home sat full of floodwater while he worked selflessly for days to help everybody else.

Being a volunteer firefighter is a tough job with little in the way of reward. These and all volunteer fire fighters deserve an immense amount of credit for putting life and limb at risk for their community every time the siren sounds.

This book will, in many ways, both recognize and memorialize the trying times of that August night. It's been a long road of recovery for the town and its people. Books are being sold for $15. Proceeds will first go to repay an advance from the Rushford Community Foundation and then to the Rushford Fire Dept. Relief Association. Call Rushford City Hall at 507-864-2444 if you're interested in purchasing a little piece of history wrapped in the narratives and memories of this courageous crew.

UPDATE (12/12/11): Embedded below is a new video report about the book, courtesy of KTTC in Rochester. In it, the author reads from Brothers in the Water and talks a little about the four year journey of recovery in Rushford.