For the uninitiated, wine talk can be puzzling. Oenophiles gush over hints of tobacco, pencil shavings, charred herbs, and loamy soil. It’s brawny, chewy, cedary, or raw. Whether these descriptions are perceptive or pretentious, they all get at something subtle and complex about wine, notably terroir: the idea that a wine’s characteristics are an expression of the place where the grapes grow.
Soil, climate, geology, topography, elevation, and local winemaking traditions and techniques all make a particular wine different from others made with the same grapes. But now scientists are finding another factor contributes to terroir: microbes. Read more