Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Soil and Wine
Soil Variability, Terroir, and Scale
9.1
The concept of terroir as a complex interaction among soil, climate, biology, and
human intervention is introduced in section 1.1. The belief that the soil in a par-
ticular vineyard imparts a distinctive character to the resulting wine is strong in
Europe, but less so in the New World. The special character or personality of a
wine may be confined to just one small block, less than 0.5 ha, for example, the
“core block” within L'Enclos of Château Latour in the Bordeaux region (Borde-
lais) of France. Alternatively, a special character may be attributed more widely to
wines from an appellation (the commune Pauillac) or to a subregion such as the
Haut-Médoc. But soil is very variable in the landscape (chapter 1), so that as the
vineyard area increases, the character of a wine is less and less likely to show a dis-
tinctive and defining influence of the soil. Soil variation, in combination with a
variation in the mesoclimate (section 1.3.2), will mask a clear, intense expression
of the underlying terroir . The grape variety, cultural practices, and the wine maker
will then dominate the wine character.
Thus, the true influence of terroir can only be satisfactorily studied for small
areas. As pointed out in section 8.2.1, soil information is typically collected at a
low sampling density over large areas to produce general-purpose soil classifica-
tions. The resulting soil maps are necessarily of a small scale (e.g., 1:1,000,000),
which means the information about small areas (1-10 ha) is unlikely to be very
accurate (see box 8.1). Hence, intensive soil surveys, with at least 6 soil pits per
ha, are necessary to study the soil factor in terroir when soil variation can be
mapped at a large scale (1:5,000). Further, with more widespread use of precision
viticulture technology, as discussed in section 5.3.5, the variation in specific soil
properties (e.g., depth to an impeding B horizon and soil strength) can be mea-
sured at intervals of about 2 m and mapped at a very large scale ( 1:1,000).
At a small scale (representing a large area), we can make generalizations, such
as that soils on limestone or chalk in Burgundy, Champagne, and the Loire Val-
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