🍷 The Terroir of Your Words

Hi friends 👋

On 31 July 1395, the Duke of Burgundy sat down and signed a document outlawing a grape.

He called the Gamay grape "very bad and very disloyal". The wine had, in his words, a "very great and terrible bitterness". It's "injurious to the human creature". "Every vine is to be cut down within the month, pulled out by the following Easter, reduced to nought ... for ever".

But it didn't work. Nobody dug them up. Forty six years later, his grandson had to issue the same ban again.

Why he did it

In the Côte d'Or, growers had planted Gamay where Pinot Noir would have grown exceptionally well. Gamay was easier, it cropped heavily, and everyone could see that it was working. You know how that goes, you look over the wall, you see the fruit next door, and you plant what they planted.

The Duke said that they left "in ruin and devastation the good places where good wine might have grown". And the thing is, he read the terroir correctly. He never said that Gamay couldn't grow. He just said it was growing in ground where something better could be.

Burgundy's terroir

Burgundy has 1,247 climats between Dijon and Santenay, sixty kilometres end to end, rarely more than two wide. Centuries old walls, hedges, paths, and meurgers, piles of stones cleared off the plots by hand and left where they fell, still marking the vineyard boundaries. Those lines follow the land, its geology, slopes, and drainage.

All growers get to know the lay of the land, its unique characteristics, challenges, and opportunities. Buyers pay varying prices for parcels. They may share a single wall for hundreds of years, but they could be quite different when it comes to what they produce.

The ground you stand on

Have you ever sat down to write something for your marketing but didnt know what to say? Perhaps you looked at four or five others doing what you do. They said more or less the same thing, and no doubt used terms that you agree with, regenerative, family run, working with nature, not against it. Perhaps you took that likeness as proof that it works. It makes sense, and if everyone says it, it must be what buyers need to hear.