Essential reading for anyone who’s ever confused tuff with tufa or wondered what the fuss is over Rutherford dust…
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http://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/taste-limestone-smell-slate-book-review
Hi Tamlyn,
Thank you for yet another incredible thorough and deep-going review. I do not understand how you have time to do anything else than book reviews on jancisrobinson.com. Impressive!
I have read most of Maltmann’s books and articles and also had the pleasure of speaking with him in person when he lectured at my wine academy. I think you raise many valid points in your critique, but I would like to comment on your statement that "Those of us who taste thousands of wines a year find it inescapable that wines from different places taste different in what seem like predictable ways. And many of us with tasting experience can see relationships between wine character and vineyard soil types. "
The first part may be less interesting, as it refers to terroir in general, of which soil and geology are only one component. So yes, a Sonoma County Chardonnay often tastes different from a Chablis—but to what extent is that due to soil or geology? The second part, however, is both interesting and importan t.
I am not part of the “us” group you refer to. After 30 years of tasting, I still find it very difficult to determine, with any certainty, the soil type a wine comes from. Yes, when everything is revealed beforehand and I know the origin and soil types, it often (or sometimes) seems straightforward. But under blind tasting conditions, I fail more often than I succeed. Perhaps I am simply not a very good tast er.
When you say that you and others can perceive these relationships, how do you know? I think we can agree that detailed information about a wine (grape variety, origin, vintage, producer, etc.) influences our assessment of it. Therefore, only blind tastings designed specifically to investigate these relationships are meaningful—that is, large, scientifically controlled, well-documented experiments with replicable resu lts.
Are you aware of such tastings or experiments that have produced convincing, statistically significant results showing that we can identify a relationship between a wine and the soil it comes from? If so, I would very much appreciate being pointed toward them, because they are what we need to be confident that the relationships you and others perceive are not simply coincidences or influenced by prior knowl edge.
Otherwise, I think the jury is still out—not on how these relationships might arise, but on whether they exist at all. If they do, we can then continue the search for an explanation. You might ask whether wine writing and teaching can rely only on facts and science. Doesn’t experience from years of tasting count for anything? It does, and I have no problem with drawing on that experience or even on sheer intuition. I simply think it should be made very clear when something is a belief rather than knowledge. This is my main concern with references to geology and soil types in wine writing and teaching: strong and direct relationships are too often presented as facts rather than as be liefs.
I do, of course, agree with you that “There is, as yet, no evidence that rocks do not influence the taste of wine.” But how meaningful is that, really? Is there any evidence that the color of the winemaker’s eyes does not influence the taste of wine? I believe not, but that does not lead us to claim that it does. So the absence of disproof does not automatically justify accepting something as fact. It seems to me that the threshold for accepting the soil–wine relationship is lower than for many other claims in this field.
Beyond using “believe” instead of “know,” my hope for the future is that we at least moderate our references to soil and geology and ask ourselves: is this really so important that it needs to be mentioned? More often than not, a region’s dominant bedrock is introduced without any attempt to explain why it matters. And if we do believe it is important, we should explain to our readers and students why that is, and how we justify our con fidence.
I very much appreciated your reference to Suzanne Simard. Humility is crucial, and years from now wine writers and scientists may well look back on us with a smile. For now, however, I do not say “and yet, and yet,” but “until then…”
Best regards, Thomas
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Whew! I wouldn’t have had the patience to review this regurgitation – but good for you!
I find your Simard analogy appropriately thought-provoking.
I don’t see how this latest book alters the fundamentally unsatisfying nature of Maltman’s position, laudable though his tenacity is in debunking a wide range of popular beliefs and intuitively plausible hunches about how rocks and soil might influence the taste of wine.
We wine tasters seek explanations or at least clues from geologists or plant physiologists concerning the way in which a wine’s character is perceived to vary with regularity and even some predictability depending with a remarkable degree of specificity on where it is grown, a correlation we find evidenced by our senses after eliminating as factors vine genetics, vintage variation, viticultural regimen, cellar practices … and even macroclimate. To the extent that Maltman even addresses perceptions of correlation between site and flavor it is to include them in his debunking. But he is not trained as a psychologist, and I see no reason to trust him that I have in nearly fifty years of tasting merely been imagining correlations that do not exist. Neither is he a plant physiologist or mycologist, and it goes without saying that any influence of geological underpinnings on grape chemistry is going to be mediated by the vine’s metabolism, and almost certainly also by the activity of mycorrhizae.
Maltman seems not to have given up on an underlying presupposition that the vine takes in all and only those (ionic) mineral nutrients that it “needs.” But nutritional deficiency and excess are grappled with regularly by wine growers, and even Malman concedes that “the vine’s selectivity processes are fallible.” Nor (as you pointed out) does he address whatever ions might be taken into the vine via water.
I’ll make this concession to Maltman (who has proven a patient and amiable correspondent): We wine professionals should recognize, in the face of scientific skepticism, the need to subject our judgments to more adequate scrutiny in controlled blind tastings.
Surely the irony cannot be lost on Maltman that he writes passionately and evocatively about matters that he takes pains to explain are irrelevant to the concerns of his intended readers.
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