Where grapevines are planted often reveals a sadistic streak. As a rule growers want them to “suffer” a little and work for a living. Call it tough love: there’s no use spoiling vines with an easy life on fertile soils. When the plants are forced to dig deep for their nutrients and water it makes them stronger, focusing their energies on what really matters, the grapes, rather than sending out billowing canopies of leaves.
And so you have rule number one for wine soils: they tend to be poor, the kind in which other crops may not thrive. Not just any poor soil will do, either: differences can have an enormous effect on a wine’s character. At least as much influence as climate, topography, grape variety and the various techniques the winemaker uses back at the cellar. For many wine producers, the notion that soil trumps all other variables has become a kind of credo. The first line on the back label is often a reference to limestone, schist, granite or slate and this increasingly creeps on to the front, too. Once, the most in-demand wine-producing consultants, such as Michel Rolland or Helen Turely, were employed for advice on when to pick and what to do in the cellar. Today’s big names are as likely to be soil specialists and terroir experts, such as Pedro Parra or microbiologists Claude and Lydia Bourguignon.
