Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

French Ministry Admits Terroir a Hoax

PARIS, April 1 -- An office within the French Ministry of Culture dropped a bombshell today, acknowledging that the much-vaunted concept of terroir--a crucial underpinning of France's claim to superiority in the world of wine--is a complete fabrication, designed to fool unsuspecting English-language wine writers and wine drinkers.

At a raucous press conference in the French State Wine Bar, just off the lobby of the celebrated Pantheon in the Latin Quarter, culture under-secretary Jean-Philippe Entre-Deux-Mers de Chambertin acknowledged what many have long suspected but few have been willing to say out loud. Barely containing his guilty Gallic pleasure, Entre-Deux-Mers de Chambertin, head of what is commonly known as the Department of Bafflegab (formally, the Institut du Bla-Bla Philosophique et Historique, or IBBPH), expressed amazement that a gullible world had swallowed the notion of soil-driven wine for a century and a half.

"In the nineteenth century," he explained, "we French were very clear that a vin de terroir was quite simply and literally a wine that tasted like dirt--and that was not a compliment. Malheureusement, we had quite a lot of it, which our own people simply refused to drink, preferring Hungarian Bull's Blood or absinthe. But we knew from centuries of experience in international mind games that the English could provide a ready market, assuming the spin was right. A people who still think they need a monarchy can be talked into anything. For them, we could make dirt seem special."

Revving up its unmatched capacity for conceptual obfuscation, the IBBPH, a mainstay of the French bureaucracy dating to the Middle Ages, set out in the 1850s to persuade anyone who would listen that sub-soil was destiny, as far as wine was concerned. The famed 1855 classification of Bordeaux vineyards succeeded in tripling wine prices for the favored spots, and the sub-division of Burgundy into innumerable hectare-sized parcels, each with an unpronounceable, hyphenated, multi-syllabic designation, worked like a charm. Best of all, wines with strong overtones of humus, bacterial by-products, and farm animal residues proved to be the perfect complement to the boring British food of the day, all boiled beef and overcooked vegetables, desperately in need of something more interesting in the glass as an accompaniment.

Beyond these functional, practical dimensions, Entre-Deux-Mers de Chambertin noted the overarching importance of the metaphysical gloss in which the emerging positive concept of terroir was swaddled. Drawing on Aristotle, who fully believed that plants suck their essences from the ground--a notion clearly at odds with the modern view of photosynthesis--the vine was portrayed by various hired IBBPH advertorialists as a mystical extension of its rooted fundament.

Proponents of terroir also reached back to René Descartes, the great seventeenth century French philosopher, famous for his formulation, "I think, therefore I am." In a telling aside, Entre-Deux-Mers de Chambertin clarified that Descartes, writing in Latin, had actually asserted, "Cogito ergo sum." "We French have always been better at Latin than the Italians," he insisted, "and Latin makes some of our philosophical work have more gravitas--another Latin word.."

In any case, for wine lovers in the British Isles, and later in the US and other English-speaking countries, "I think therefore I am" soon morphed into "The French think it, so it must be true." The same model of persuasion was utilized in the twentieth century, Entre-Deux-Mers de Chambertin pointed out, with the phenomenal spread of existentialism--basically a way to  pick up girls in cafes, masquerading as a philosophical system--and later with deconstruction, the touchstone for innumerable graduate school dissertation topics, all conjured out of thin air.

"Fortunately," he concluded, "we no longer have need for the concept of terroir, since our wines have emerged into the modern era. Soon the EU will allow us to use oak chips and reverse osmosis, and terroir can assume its rightful place as a conceptual museum piece."

Spokespersons for the IBBPH declined comment on rumors that they would soon be releasing information on two other hoaxes the French have apparently perpetrated on themselves, the ongoing Jerry Lewis cult and the inexplicable popularity of Johnny Hallyday.

For more seasonal wine misinformation, go to http://dregsreport.com

Voyeur du Vin: The Breitstein Collection

The Culinary Institute of America—the foodie CIA—in its California incarnation in St. Helena has many tasty things to offer: all manner of classes, an astonishing teaching kitchen, a first-rate restaurant, wine courses up the gazoo, a kitchen gadget shop to end all kitchen gadget shops, and one of the most photogenic exteriors in Napa. The latest addition, unveiled only a couple weeks ago, is a collection of historic California wines to die for: you can’t drink them, but just gazing on the bottles and the labels is worth a visit.

The exhibit is a portion of the personal collection of David and Judy Breitstein, owners of the fabled Duke of Bourbon wine shop in Canoga Park in Southern California—amazingly, Canoga Park is a wine-lovers’ destination—who are also longtime fanatic collectors of California wine. The 150+ sampling of rare and historic bottles donated to the CIA spans a good portion of the length and breadth of California wine, from Napa to Santa Barbara, from Cabernet Sauvignon to Riesling, from a Prohibition-era 1928 Angelica altar wine from Concannon Vineyard in Livermore to a 2002 Araujo Estate Eisele Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon cult wine from Napa.

No, there isn’t a tasting bar. But there are short, useful explanatory notes about each wine by Karen McNeil, the CIA’s head wine honchess, putting the wines in their historic contexts. And then there are the real, live, mint condition, honest-to-goodness bottles. These are wines you’ve read about, heard about, or—better yet—NEVERF heard about; but all of them made a difference in the unfolding saga of California wine.

The Breitstein Collection is on your way into the barrel room / Vintners Hall of Fame at the CIA’s Greystone campus. So in between fighting your way up to various tasting room counters on your next Napa visit, drop by the CIA and see the wines that made California famous.