Dirt is Not Terroir

It was the early eighties, and I was yet again rereading several chapters of Edmund Penning-Rowsell’s tome The Wines of Bordeaux. I had just spent the day tasting in Graves and Sauternes from the tank and barrel with renowned French wine exporter Christopher Cannan. Now it was night, and I was getter ready for bed in a small, dimly lit guest room above the offices of his company Europvin in the city of Bordeaux. We were visiting the Chateaux he worked with throughout all the appellations of Bordeaux. Each night before sleep I would review the appellations we had visited that day and those we would visit the next. That week long visit to Bordeaux was followed by a week in Burgundy with Becky Wasserman and my nightly reading changed to Burgundy, then a brand-new book authored by Anthony Hanson.

The next year I made a similar trip to Italy. Setting off with famed Italian wine exporter Neil Empson, we visited almost every wine area of Italy to taste at nearly every estate in his extensive portfolio on a three-week tasting marathon. In my bag was a well-worn copy of Burton Anderson’s Vino, the Italian wine bible of the day. My reading pattern was the same as when I was in France, reviewing each night on where we had been and cramming on where we were headed the next day.

I have been lucky over my career to have made multiple such trips to France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Australia. Top that off with many, many trips through the wine regions of California, Oregon and Washington. On each trip I would devour the current wine literature of each region before, during and after each visit.

I was obsessed with wine books and literally would buy and read whatever came out each year and my bookshelves overflowed with dog-eared, wine-stained volumes. This was the era of my life when I was a wine importer and distributor based in Chicago. Then, two decades ago, I made the transition from wine distribution to wine production and my reading list began to change. Slowly but surely instead of reading books about wine, I began reading books about farming. I recently realized this when I noticed that the last five books I’ve read all have the word soil in the title.

Even though my reading materials have changed, I am still as obsessed by the concept of terroir as I was decades ago in that small room in Bordeaux. However, what that means to me has changed significantly.

Those books presented terroir as something magical. That each site is a unique expression of the soil where it was grown. Then you actually start to grow wine and a new reality presents itself.

Take Oregon and Burgundy for example. In the Willamette Valley the soils are volcanic or sedimentary acidic soils. Summers are almost desert-like with no rain for months. Burgundies are grown on alkaline limestone soils and there is rain throughout the growing season. There’s not much in common here except one thing — outstanding pinot noir. Time after time experienced professional tasters find it difficult to tell which wine is Willamette Valley and which is Burgundy.

Burgundy and the Willamette Valley are not alone in this for the same experts can confuse California and Washington Cabernet with Bordeaux and California Coast and Oregon Syrah with Rhône wines. Each of these areas are very different from each other. How it is possible that all can produce wines whose provenance confuses the experts?

The reason is we have always made the cornerstone of terroir the type of soil the vine grows in — limestone, volcanic, granitic, sedimentary and so on. But it turns out that it’s not the exact type of soil that matters as much as the life in the soil itself. It has been this realization that changed my reading from wine books to soil books.

Terroir is not an expression of inert dirt, it is the individual expression of living soil and how a healthy plant intertwines with that soil. Dirt is not always soil. Soil is a system teeming with life.

Obviously, there are distinct sites. Terroir is a combination of many things. Climate and mesoclimate are critical, then there is the human element — row spacing, trellising and picking the right variety for the right place. For example, planting cabernet in a cool climate and pinot in a warm climate is not a great idea. But it takes grapes grown on healthy vines on living soils to make an expressive wine with a distinct character.

What makes for a living soil? Here is where you find the reason that biodynamic wines have a unique liveliness that stands out. Sustainable agriculture is not enough. That only means that you are killing the life in your soils more slowly than industrial agriculture. It is only with regenerative agriculture that you can build soil that creates distinctive, individualistic wines.

Plants and the microbiology in the soil have a complex symbiotic relationship. The plant takes a large percentage of the carbohydrates it produces through photosynthesis and pushes this exudate out through its roots to attract the microbes it needs to extract nutrition from the soil. It can change the mix of exudates depending on its requirements at the moment. A healthy plant decides the microbiology in the soil by the mix of gourmet microbe treats it sends out through its roots. That microbiology then returns the favor by processing the nutrients in the soil into a form the plant can utilize. The healthier the plant, the healthier that microbiology becomes. The healthier that microbiology becomes, the healthier the plant becomes. Not a bad system.

Then we come in and screw it up. The application of pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers destroys nature’s well-tuned system. In that system is to be found what makes a vineyard unique. It is an essential element of what we call terroir. The grapes that make distinctive wines come from vines in vineyards where nature’s system is humming along. Our job as farmers is to assist the plant and soil in regenerating that balance year after year. This is vital when you have a perennial crop like vines that do not lend themselves to crop rotation.

Coming back to the Willamette Valley and Burgundy comparison, perhaps their shared qualities come more from the life in their soils than their geological provenance.

I still read before and after vineyard visits. However, these days they are not wine books, they are soil books. It is in the soil you find great wine.

The 500 Milestone

Troon winemaker Nate Wall filling cow horns with fresh organic manure

You start with dung and end with humus. Newton was right, alchemy exists. What was worthless becomes gold. A concentrated collection of fungi and bacteria to inoculate our soils. This is not magic, just good bugs. 

We mark significant progress towards goals by celebrating milestones, events that measure our progress. Milestones should be recognized and remembered as you strive towards your goal. Some milestones are hard to measure, but in this case the achievement was very clear. Six months ago at Troon Vineyard we placed raw manure into some cow horns and last week we dug them up and out came soil - humus. The production of your first BD 500 is always a milestone for a Biodynamic farmer.

Why do you have to bury the manure in cow horns? The honest answer is that we don’t know, but we do know that no other container has successfully transformed manure into this important soil inoculate. Maria Thun, in her seeming endless research on all things Biodynamic tried to use other containers, but none produced the same results. For whatever reason, the cow horns are the only known container that transforms raw manure to the rich humus that is BD 500. Rudolf Steiner thought the cow horns channeled the power of the Universe into the manure. Personally, I believe that fermenting manure does not require quite that much energy. The fungi and bacteria are already here just waiting to do their jobs if given the proper opportunity. Right now, the cow horns do the best job of creating just the right environment for them to do their work. Perhaps in the future other containers will be discovered. 

The process of making BD 500 is actually quite simple. Last fall we gathered some very, very fresh cow manure from the pastures of Noble Dairy, our organic next-door neighbor (a great project for our harvest interns) and simply filled the cow horns with the fresh manure. The cow horns themselves came from the Josephine Porter Institute, perhaps the premier supplier for the Biodynamic farmer. Then we buried them last fall and dug them up early this summer. The transformation may seem magical, but it’s not as this is what the microbes in our soil do and all we did was provide them an opportunity to do their work in particularly pleasant conditions. 

So often we use mystical excuses to explain things we do not understand and there is still a lot we do not understand. Science and agriculture have had a difficult relationship. All too often, most scientific research focused on simply making more as bigger harvests promise more profit. The situation worsened as Big Ag took over the world. Quantity not quality generated the funding for most research with predictable results. In his book The Third Plate, chef Dan Barber relates the tale of university researchers being offered commissions by Monsanto to create wheat that was resistant to Roundup so that more of their product could be applied to grain on the way to a bakery near you.

Fortunately, things are changing and the microbiome of soil is the hot “new” topic being pursued by researchers. Many think what winegrowers have been calling terroir for centuries is actually more defined by the soil’s microbiome than the type of soil the vine is growing in. One thing for sure is that vines cannot take their nutrition from the soil without their mycorrhizal partners. The goal of Biodynamic farming is to build this natural balance in our soils. Healthy vines can handle many of the things Mother Nature throws their way without our help. In fact, often “our help” makes things worse for them. For some reason, we humans assume we know more about ripening grapes than grapevines do. 

After harvest this fall, our own BD 500 will be applied to our soils. There are those in Biodynamics that believe elemental beings are at work among their plants. I believe in them too. However, not the gnomes and such that some followers of Steiner believe in. The real elemental beings are the fungi and bacteria that work the real magic in the vineyard and are elemental to life itself. When we apply BD 500 to our soils we are just bringing more of those elemental beings to the party. 

Milestones are worthy of celebration and rituals. As a group, we gathered to fill and bury our horns and then again when we dug up the finished BD 500. We will all gather and celebrate again when we apply our own BD 500 to our vineyard this fall. We all come together to celebrate our milestones as we bring Troon Vineyard back to life.

In Biodynamics, the people are elemental beings too.

Freshly filled cow horns being prepared to be buried

Planting New Vineyards at Troon - It Only Looks Like the Beginning

New vines arrived at Troon Vineyard yesterday from Inland Desert Nursery in Washington - mourvèdre, grenache noir and marsanne all neatly packed into shipping boxes. Next week more classic southern French varieties will arrive and within the next ten days, we’ll have planted over 14,000 vines to create ten new acres of vineyard.

Stacked in their shipping boxes they look like the beginning of a project, but it only looks that way. This project started a year and a half ago and the arrival of the vines themselves is closer to the end than the beginning of the project of planting a vineyard. The first step was extensive soil studies as Vineyard Soil Technologies dug more than seventy five-feet deep soil pits to create detailed soil profiles. Based on that data we selected ten acres as ideal for vineyard development. Combining the soil data and climate data with our experience we selected the varieties we felt would be best matched to each vineyard block to be developed. We then begin working with Inland Desert Nursery to obtain the clones of the varieties we chose to focus on. The varieties we were looking for are not the most popular so ordering from the nursery long in advance is required.

Planting does not begin with plants. First, there was the soil work and that filled most of the last year and a half. Once the blocks to be planted were identified the ground had to be prepared. That meant heavy equipment as a D8 ripped the ground to a depth of thirty-six inches. Prior to the ripping, we applied five tons per acre of organic compost along with other soil amendments that we discovered were required by our soil studies. This was followed by discing then yet another finishing discing. When the soil was prepared we seeded a specifically designed cover crop to add nutrition to the soil. As Biodynamic farmers, we also did our first application of Biodynamic Preparation 500.

Over the winter and spring, the cover crop prospered. This was then mowed, then disced into the soil as green manure. Then the vineyard begin to take form as we put in end posts, stakes for each vine (head-trained vines) and irrigation tubes for the soon to arrive young, and very thirsty vines. In addition, another application of Biodynamic preparation 500 was applied to both the blocks to be planted along with all existing vineyard blocks.

Only after all of this investment and work did we arrive at last Friday, when the first vines arrived. Their arrival was the culmination of all of this work, not the beginning. However, these vines mark the beginning of new wines that will come from the grapes they will yield. In that sense, they are truly a new beginning for Troon Vineyard.

As you see, the plan for planting these new acres at Troon was built upon scientific research, extensive viticultural experience, the principles of Biodynamic agriculture and on a vision to make wines with a unique character defined by our soils and the climate on the Kubli Bench in Oregon's Applegate Valley.

Over the next weeks, I will be documenting the process of planting these new vines at Troon Vineyard in words and images. I invite you to share that process with us as we build a foundation for a new generation of wines at Troon.