We gathered at the pond and Howell poured us the 1992 Volcanic Hill, Red Rock Terrace, and Gravelly Meadow vintages. (He also thanked the corporate sponsor who underwrote this costly tasting—to make good on a golf bet that Howell won long ago in Jamaica.) The same grape, the same vintage, the same location, the same winemaker, and yet we could tell the wines apart.
All were young, tight, bold cabernets of good structure, of course. But one was more rounded, another relatively bright and forward, the third more closed and nuanced. Were these vague-sounding impressions the best that our scientist's palates could do? Or were our logical temperaments being swayed by the vivid surroundings, the romance of the vineyards in spring, and possibly the many other wines we'd been tasting with lunch beforehand?
Brounstein himself was little more help, an elderly wistful winegrower who did not share our language or outlook. He could only muse that after all, the gravel bed got more shade and the terrace faced the northwest. The wines were 5 to 10 years early for American tastes although the French loved their wines young, and in a few years the wines might be very different. . . . It seemed that even this experiment had too many variables.
Our remaining hope for answers was the third and final stop, Livingston Wines, near Rutherford at the foot of the western hills on the Rutherford bench, an alluvial fan with coarse soil and sharp drainage. John Livingston is a retired geologist, after all, and surely had pondered the problem of terroir in ways we would find congenial.
In Livingston's kitchen we tasted his 1995 Moffett Vineyard Cabernet, from land right next to a vineyard owned by Pine Ridge Winery. And indeed this rich, ripe, assertive wine was very much like Pine Ridge's Rutherford cabernet we'd had that morning, including the distinctive flavor of "Rutherford dust." Yet we definitely knew they were different. Of course, the vintages weren't the same, and neither was the time of day, or the winemaking practices, and yadda-yadda-yadda . . .
So, does the geologist have special insight into the winemaker's struggle with terroir? Livingston hardly paused at the question. "Not really," he said. Perhaps sensing a slight disappointment, he added, "although I am able to size up a vineyard quickly, for instance. I can see right away if it has all the elements that I want." We nodded, had some more wine, and presently we were studying the large "black granite" tabletop in Livingston's kitchen and asking him about the Ubatuba stone it was made from.
At the end of the day, it seemed that terroir is just what the French say it is—all the million factors that influence the grape. The pessimist might feel that therefore winemaking is basically a hopeless muddle of "checks and balances of almost impossible intricacy," and that personal taste and marketing flimflam and accidents of nature make the whole thing a crap-shoot. But I think optimistically of other fields of practice that started out as art before they became science—alchemy, medicine, geology itself. Progress is inevitable, and I hope to live long enough to taste the greatest wines ever made.
PS: I've continued to explore the question, of course; a wine drinker with geological awareness can hardly do otherwise. Some further evidence and wine labels are presented in the Geology and Society picture gallery and in the Geology and Wine category. And David Howell has gone on to publish "The Winemaker’s Dance: Exploring Terroir in the Napa Valley."
