Themes

Is Terroir Real? The Hundred-Year Fight Over What Makes a Great Wine Great

Roger Dion called terroir a social fact; Enjalbert and Pijassou answered with the soil. A century of scholarly debate over what makes a great wine great.

In 1959 the geographer Roger Dion wrote that the hierarchy of French vineyards is a "fait social et non géologique": a social fact, not a geological one. Six years earlier Henri Enjalbert, a geographer in Bordeaux, had argued the opposite. Historians and geographers have been disputing the point for the better part of a century, and the dispute has not been settled.

Almost none of this reaches the wine trade's own account. In a Bordeaux tasting room the explanation is geological. The gravel banks of the Médoc, laid down by ancient rivers, drain the winter rain away from the vines and hold the summer heat. The limestone beneath Saint-Émilion gives Merlot its finesse. The combination of soil, subsoil, slope and climate, called terroir, is why a great growth tastes like no other wine. On this account the land made the wine, and could not have made anything else.

The geological account

The Médoc's leading estates sit on croupes, low gravel rises left behind by ancient rivers. They drain freely, force roots to grow deep, and reflect warmth onto ripening Cabernet Sauvignon. Saint-Émilion has its limestone plateau and Pomerol its clays. The Graves are named for their gravel.

In this version the map of great wine is a map of soils, and the classifications only ratified what nature had already decided. The great vineyards were always great; people found out. Wine labels, estate tours and websites repeat some form of it. It is also the account that Dion, the founder of modern French wine historiography, set out to dismantle.

Roger Dion: terroir as a social fact

Dion held a chair at the Collège de France and worked as both geographer and historian. His Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France, des origines au XIXe siècle appeared in 1959. Medievalists reviewed it at length when it came out, among them Wolff in the Cahiers de civilisation médiévale in 1962. The book is still in print with CNRS Éditions and is still routinely described as the standard reference in its field.

For Bordeaux, the argument runs as follows. The classified growths do not owe their wealth to any inherent superiority of their soils. They owe it to a commercial strategy pursued since the Middle Ages: making quality wine on purpose for wealthy export buyers, the English above all. The turning points historians can actually document in Bordeaux's rise are commercial. In the thirteenth century the English trade made Bordeaux the kingdom's wine port. Privileges then protected its wines against competitors from further up the river. In the seventeenth century Dutch merchants introduced technical innovations. Around 1700 came luxury claret made for London. Wherever elite demand lasted long enough, capital and expertise followed it, and quality was then built up plot by plot over several centuries, together with the price that such quality could command from the buyers who had created the demand for it.

Dion is often caricatured on one point, so it needs stating precisely. He never said soil does not matter. It does. In his account soil and climate are necessary but not sufficient. A great vineyard needs favourable land, but favourable land is far more common than great vineyards. What separates a famous gravel rise from an anonymous one, he argued, is not the gravel. It is history: distance to markets, and the accumulated decisions of merchants, proprietors and states.

Enjalbert, Pijassou and the Bordeaux school

The opposing case came from the geographers of Bordeaux, and it was in print before Dion's book. In 1953 Henri Enjalbert published an essay titled "Comment naissent les grands crus" ("How great growths are born"), and his position was that the distribution of the great growths is not an accident of commerce but follows specific physical conditions that can be mapped, so that identifying those conditions is the geographer's job. The two positions faced each other for decades.

Enjalbert's student René Pijassou wrote the school's major work. Un grand vignoble de qualité : le Médoc (Flammarion, 1980) runs to two volumes, 42 plates and 196 figures, and remains the academic reference on the Médoc. The geographer Louis Papy reviewed it at length in the Annales de Géographie in 1983. Pijassou combined archive work with fieldwork on a scale nobody has repeated since. His account centres on pedology, and in it the physical character of the Médoc's gravel croupes is the decisive factor that Dion had denied it. The great estates and the best gravels coincide, Pijassou argued, and not by chance.

The school also had an institution. In 1969 and 1970 Alain Huetz de Lemps, as director, founded CERVIN, a Bordeaux research centre on vine and wine, with Papy, Enjalbert, Pijassou and Philippe Roudié. It still exists as an association of researchers hosted at the ISVV, Bordeaux's institute of vine and wine science. The terroir geographers answered Dion in print and then built an organisation around the answer.

The anthropologists and cultural historians

From the 1990s a third group took up the question. Much of this work is anthropological, and much of it is in English. Robert Ulin, drawing on his ethnography of cooperative growers in the Bordeaux region, argued that terroir works as an ideology: it presents a hierarchy that history built as though nature had ordained it. Marion Demossier, working on Burgundy, has analysed terroir as a constructed identity that growers perform as much as inherit. The historian Kolleen Guy has shown how wine regions were built into French national identity. Amy Trubek has traced how the "taste of place" was worked out as a cultural category. A 2019 article in Global Food History, "Geographical Turns and Historical Returns in Narrating French Wine Culture", surveys this literature and its long argument with the geographers.

None of this means the third group has won. Soil scientists and geographers go on defending, refining and mapping the physical basis of the appellations, while the anthropologists and historians go on historicising it. The argument is carried on in journals and monographs. Neither side has conceded it.

Where the two camps agree

Set the caricatures aside and the positions are closer than their rhetoric. Dion granted the physical preconditions: nobody builds a great vineyard on land that cannot ripen grapes. The pedological school never wrote a history of soil alone. Pijassou's two volumes give hundreds of pages to proprietors, merchants and the London market alongside the soil maps.

Both camps accept that great wine appears where favourable natural conditions meet centuries of sustained demand, capital and human choice. The dispute is over weighting. They also dispute what the word terroir hides when it is offered as a one-word explanation.

That dispute reaches the shop shelf. A back label that credits a "unique terroir" for a wine's character and price is taking a side in a scholarly argument without saying that the argument exists. The classifications the trade still works by were drawn up by brokers who ranked estates on their long-run market prices. Whether those prices followed geology, as Enjalbert and Pijassou held, or a market built by centuries of commercial strategy, as Dion held, is the question itself. The answer the evidence supports is both, in proportions that are still being argued over. A label that offers geology alone is giving half of it.