The wine industry has long looked for ways to explain the relationship between physical environment and resulting wine. The word "terroir" is a convenient umbrella term, although terroir deniers claim that it’s mostly a marketing tool.
But anecdotally, winemakers have often noted differences in vines and grapes growing in close approximation.
“Terroir is just such a cool concept,” says Jeffrey Munroe, a professor of earth and climate science at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. “[For] anyone who enjoys wine and thinks about landscapes and place, it’s so logical, it’s so established, and it’s this thing that people love to throw around. And yet it’s brutally difficult to prove if you want to be a scientist.”
Winemakers already use conventional soil analysis as an agricultural tool. But because grape vines typically have deep roots, and standard soil sampling methods don’t typically dig deep, shallow soil analysis is missing a lot of important information. Looking deeper—maybe even as far down as the roots—may actually be the key to understanding terroir.
Italian geologist Carlo Ferretti, the founder of Geo Identity Research, says a new approach can better identify what in the ground is actually affecting grape production. He calls it Vineyard Geological Identity (VGI). It’s an analytical framework that uses a variety of environmental data—sediment, mineral, geology and geochemistry, soil chemistry, and other physical elements, plus human impacts—and analyses to ascertain specific features of vineyards that could impact winemaking.
A shared language of wine and science
As a geologist based in Bolzano, located in Italy’s South Tyrol Alto Adige wine region, Ferretti realized that geologists and wine professionals were not necessarily “talking the same language,” he says. He wanted to find a method that could be used globally as a comparative tool for winemakers. The idea, he says, was to create a framework that could make connections between all the growing conditions and inputs and, eventually, be able to link those to the resulting wine.
An early study of the concept was done in the Italian Alps, close by the village of Tramin, where Gewürztraminer has been grown since around 1000 CE. Ferretti took samples at eight vineyards and subjected them to a barrage of tests, and found the vineyards with finely-textured silicate soil tend to produce wines on the spicy side that age well.
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