The Unanswered Question

Importer Terry Theise has published his 2007 Germany Catalog, and as usual, along with his invaluable tasting notes are extended ruminations -- evocative, poetic, pseudo-philosophical -- on the state of the wine world and, in particular, German Riesling. Especially noteworthy, given the most recent flare-up in the so-called "terroir wars," are Theise's thoughts on minerality -- a favorite subject of my co-blogger Jeffrey. Jeffrey would find a kindred spirit in Theise, who exalts minerality as "a higher form of complexity than fruit."

Now, Theise still clings to the unscientific notion of the direct transmission of minerals from soil to vine (he praises the long hang-time of German Riesling for allowing the vines "lots of time to leach minerals from the geologically complex sub-soils"). Yet unlike many like-minded adherents, Theise argues that minerality "doesn't yield to literal associations":

Search for "fruit" and you'll find it eventually: some combination of apples and pears and melons and limes and there they are all. But search for the detail in mineral and you grope fruitlessly ... An answered question halts the process of thinking, but an unanswered question leaves wonder awake, and this is why I prize minerality highest among wine's virtues.

It is this quality of ineffability that make these wines, in Theise's view, a deeper, more profound reflection of the beauty, mystery, and ambiguity of the natural world. In Thiese's tasting notes, one can find the stray reference to "slate" or "chalk," yet more often "minerality" is described in terms of its character: "steely," "powdery," "salty," "pungent," "craggy." And even more frequently, the term "minerality" or "minerally" is left completely unmodified, posed again and again like Charles Ives's Unanswered Question, ever without resolution.

Of course, it is crucial to observe, as Theise does, that minerality is not synonymous with acidity, "nor does it relate to acidity" (I wonder how much of what some call a wine's "mineral cut" actually relates to the acidity, as opposed to the mineral flavors, of a wine). Nor is minerality synonymous with austerity, or merely a means "to excuse underripe wines." Rather, at their most extroverted, these are "wines of gushingly lavish flavor ... you could swear had rocks passed through them." Or at their finest, wines that "pass beyond the mere sense of stone into flavors mysterious enough to compel thoughts of jewels."

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A Morbid Post

Another thing is worth mentioning in regard to the issue
discussed below. The mere fact that science lacks (as of yet) an explanation for some observable phenomenon does not mean that said phenomenon is a figment of the imagination or the construct of evocative prose.

Until recently, we did not understand the mechanism behind X-linked Severe Combined Immunodeficiency. (It turns out to result from a mutation in the gamma chain of the interleukin-2 receptor.) Unfortunately for those afflicted with X-SCID, the absence of an explanation did not absolve them of the need to live in a hermetically sealed bubble because of their compromised immune systems.

Other examples abound. Glioblastoma is brain tumor. Even today, its causes are understood not at all and its mechanisms very poorly. But it will kill you all the same. Ditto for Alzheimer's and Multiple Sclerosis.

Similarly, the mere lack of a scientific explanation of the mechanism by which a wine reflects the soil in which its grapes are grown is not evidence for the absence of the ultimate effect.

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On Minerality

From a Chablis Vaudesir to a good village cru Macon to the $13 pinot grigio recently recommended to me in my local wine store, there's nothing I love more than a wine with a great mineral cut. And I think (or at least like to think) that I can and do differentiate between different minerally tastes. On the other hand, I've never gone in for the "list all the fruits you can think of" approach to describing various fruit flavors in wine. That's always seemed silly and reductionist to me. I justify the dichotomy on the ground that, when talking about different minerals, there's something real there--grand cru chablis is actually grown in soil from kimmeridgian limestone, and that's what I'm tasting. On the other hand, grapes are not actually grown out of boysenberries, huckleberries, or whatever other fruit happens to spring to mind at the moment a taster wants to describe the fruit flavors in the wine he's drinking.

That's why I was temporarily disheartened to read in Eric Asimov's post on Friday that a recent NYT magazine article "refutes the most literal meaning of terroir – that grape vines can somehow transmit the mineral components of the vineyard soil directly into a wine." Asimov adds that "Of course [one does not literally taste granite in the glass], just as you’re not literally tasting road tar and violets in a Barolo, or gooseberries and cat urine in a New Zealand sauvignon blanc, to take a few common wine descriptions." He then goes on to defend wine lovers' appreciating the aromatic and flavor experience of drinking wine despite the lack of scientific evidence behind them.

I entirely agree with the latter part of Asimov's post, and I think he does a great job of expressing why we shouldn't allow science to undermine our appreciation of the beautiful flavors and aromas that wine evokes. But, on reflection, I think he gives up too much to the scientists when he concedes that we're not actually tasting the kimmeridgian limestone in that Chablis Vaudesir. Certainly, large chunks of limestone are not being incorporated into chardonnay grapes just because they were grown in the soil. As McGee and Patterson point out in that Times magazine article, the vines are soaking up rock particles dissolved into the soil. They read that to mean that the grapes are not incorporating the actual limestone, and so when we think we smell or taste limestone in the glass, we cannot actually be doing so. The problem with this logic is not that it misunderstands how rock is incorporated into Chablis, but rather that it misunderstands how we experience limestone in other contexts. When we say that Chablis flavors remind us of limestone, we're not comparing those flavors to the experience of biting off a chunk of rock. Rather, we're comparing them to the smell of limestone, in other words to the experience of those limestone minerals that dissolve in water and/or evaporate and/or decompose into dirt so that we can smell them--which are the same ones soaked up by vines.

I'm not a scientist, so perhaps the above is totally wrong-headed. But it makes sense to me. And I just can't believe the notion that soil qualities have nothing to do with how a wine tastes. There's just too much empirical evidence. Wines from different places taste so different. Admittedly, other factors such as climate, local practice and culture, etc. play a huge role and are obstacles to duplication. But I'm sure there is somewhere else in this world with similar climate conditions to Chablis, and if you could make a wine taste like Vaudesir in that somewhere else, people would be doing it by now.

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