Terroir or Winemaking?

The great thing about wine is that you can never pin it down, there is much more gray area than there is black and white. A certain style of wine may appeal to one person and be entirely dismissed by another. Just when I think that certain platitudes about wine hold true for me, something comes along and shatters them to bit.

Wine is made in the vineyard. I have held this belief long before I started farming and even more so when I realized what it took to produce Pinot Noir from a very difficult site in a climate as unpredictable as Oregon. My ideas about Pinot Noir have always been that given a good vintage year grapes from a great site simply needed to be handled minimally to let the Terroir shine through.

Not so fast my friend. As I take more control over winemaking for my own brand, I realize that very subtle changes in winemaking practice can produce widely different results even with minimal handling. Perhaps it is because Pinot Noir's delicacy reflects subtle changes more so than any other variety? Whatever the reason I was a little shocked at the differences between winemaking when tasting wine recently with David O'Reilly. I have been around Oregon Pinot Noir for nearly ten years now and have formed pretty clear ideas about how it should be made. But David has been around it longer and has shared some of his knowledge about dealing with Pinot Noir.

In 2006 I moved the Lenné wine production to Owen Roe's facility and started overseeing the winemaking direction with David's help. Tasting through the 06 wines, I was stunned at the lush texture and the purity of fruit. The wines were a direct expression of the Yamhill-Carlton District appellation: deep, dark black fruits with coffee and spice in the background. We also tasted through the 05 Pinot which were made at Anne Amie winery but moved to Owen Roe recently for bottling. The wines also showed the deep black cherry that is indicative of the site, but in a slightly different style. The 05's were more evolved, but less pure and lush because of more time in the barrel and slightly different winemaking which showed the wines evolution rather than the purity of the fruit.  While both wines were handled minimally with gravity, the differences were huge and it made me think that subtle winemaking differences can have a huge impact in what we think of as Terroir.

The thought was put in perspective by my favorite wine store owner Sandy Thompson of Mount Tabor Fine Wines. He told me that there are two different styles for Pinot Noir as he sees it. There are the wineries that completely oxygen deprive their wines,striving to maintain the fresh fruit character from degrading through oxidation. These Pinot Noirs generally see newer oak but for shorter periods of time, typically 10 months. Most of the big name Pinot Producers make wine in this style including some very sought after, high scoring wines.  Then there is the other style of Pinot Noir which relies on older barrels and even less handling, keeping the wine in barrels longer with minimal if any racking(moving the wine off the sediment that settles-lees). These wines often pick up earthy, leesy components and perpetuate hydrogen sulfide(h2s smells like rotten egg) aromas by the infrequent rackings. Some people mistake h2s for Terroir. Several "cult" Pinot Noir producers make wines with very noticeable levels of h2s and people tend to see them as having a lot of "funky character."

So what style of winemaking more closely reflects the Terroir of a given site? The wines that are oxygen deprived reflect the true character of the fruit and yet the influence of newer oak tends to mitigate Terroir by adding another component. The second style of wine tends to change the character of the wine by exposing the fruit to more oxygen and some might argue it takes some oxygen to let the Terroir reveal itself. But there is no question that the fruit changes to a more cooked versus fresh fruit character.

Again, wine is not black and wine. It is up to each winemaker to express the Terroir of a site it a style that best expresses their own personal ideas about how to realize it in their wines. You will have to follow our wines to see what my personal expression is. I know it will evolve because there is still a lot of gray area.

For an excellent discussion on Terroir versus winemaking aromas click here.