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.

Home and the Art of Self Invention

Home has many connotations. Traditionally, of course, it is where the heart is. For some of us, it is also where the art is.  Increasingly, it is someplace between the real and the virtual, as tech writer Aleks Krotoski of The Guardian recently noted in her column Home: how the internet has changed our concept of what home is.

Her insights were brought about through a graduate course in Environmental Psychology. It is a broad field, as Krotoski suggests, and covers much in the way of how humans relate to nature. The research investigates ways in which our surroundings influence who we (think we) are and the places that we love. This is the conceptual territory of place-identity and place-attachment, respectively. These are affective things, that is to say, fluid and ever changing, these identities and attachments. They exist as moving targets, flows, and, in the main, exist in the psyche. As such they exemplify a degree of plasticity in our brains that is constantly folding over on itself and reestablishing a sense of self in place, as the communications scholar James Cantrill (at Northern Michigan U) might suggest.

For Krotoski, these notions became evident in a course that "sought to understand how spaces become places because of how they are laid out."  In this way, as a sub-field of what is also sometimes called ecopsychology, social science researchers spend a lot of time investigating, as Krotoski says, "how houses become homes because of the amount of ourselves we put into them."

We often define ourselves by what we see around us. We live in a certain neighborhood, a particular type of house, we decorate in a specific style (well, not all of us). But the labels that are used to define these surroundings often then are used to define the people who adopt them.  We use such labels to simplify the multiplicitous world: I'm a west-sider. He lives in an Arts & Craft bungalow. She uses a Victorian theme with a dash of Americana. This becomes how we label ourselves and our sense of self often dictates how we arrange the spaces and places around us. It is a pinwheel of sensation and evaluation, action and reaction.

As it is with our physical surroundings, so it has become for our online environments.

The web has inspired a postmodern understanding of what "home" is, suggests Krotoski. Though she writes of the UK, I believe this can be generalized to the US as well, among a growing demographic from Boomers through Millenials. This postmodern sensibility is "a de-physicalised, conceptual and psychological phenomenon that externalises its invisible meanings," Krotoski writes.  Well put.  We design homepages. We create online identities. These often reflect our corporeal selves but don't necessarily always match up. The virtual is a sculpted version of our true self, and maybe closer to the self we want to be. Maybe an indication of future intent.

We can be more or less of who we've been or who we want to be by just changing an image or telling a tall-tale online. It is a flux, a flow, of identity creation.  We are both hyper connected and more free than ever to self-evolve and perpetually recreate.The impacts of this are speculative and will be fascinating to watch evolve through the lens of social science research.