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  • Larry Meinert:  Since this is going to be a science talk, let's start with a little

  • thought experiment. Imagine two vineyards right next to each other.

  • One, over hundreds of years, has produced acclaimed wine that everybody loves, and sells

  • for ridiculous prices, hundreds of dollars a bottle. Then you crawl over a fence to the

  • vineyard right next to it. Might be owned by the same person, maybe growing the same

  • grapes. Everything's identical the same sun, same rain, same wind except this produces

  • really mediocre wine that sells to the local café for 50 cents a liter.

  • Here's the scientific question: Why? I spend a fair bit of time working on this question.

  • Yes indeed, it does require laboratory experience to evaluate this properly. We tried to have

  • a lab part of tonight's lecture, but apparently that's not so easy to do in a federal facility,

  • so you'll have to go home and do the laboratory part as a self study tonight after the lecture.

  • So I'm going to be addressing this question of "why?" There's actually a technical name

  • for that called "terroir," which is a French word that's kind of hard to translate.

  • [banging sounds] OK. Do you know where Hannah went?

  • Audience Member:  She just went outside. Larry:  I would go outside, too, if I were

  • her. [laughter]

  • Audience Member:  [indecipherable 01:51] Larry:  So while they're trying to figure

  • that out, let me continue the explanation. "Terroir" is a French word that refers to

  • all of the factors that affect the growing characteristics of grapes. The simplest list of all the things we look at:

  • climate, soil, geology, culture, all the things that influence the quality of wine.

  • And what makes this really different from normal food and gardening? Do we have anybody

  • here who has a garden, who likes to garden? So if you're growing anything tomatoes, cantaloupe,

  • corn you are probably going to get very rich soil and water and just baby those plants

  • and try to get them to be as big and as luscious as possible. Grapes for wine production are

  • almost exactly the opposite. Left to their own devices, the grapes will

  • overproduce. They'll produce really large grapes if they have unlimited access to water

  • and nutrients. And they'll be just like those strawberries that you buy at your local supermarket.

  • They're big, they're luscious, they look great. They just lack one characteristic, that thing

  • called taste. So if you bought those big strawberries, you always bring them home. I fall for it

  • every time, especially after a nice, long winter. I see those luscious strawberries.

  • I go, "Wow! Those look so good!" I bring them home, and I taste them. There's just no taste

  • there. The same thing will happen with grapes. And

  • for making fine wine, you really want to get the intense flavors. And to do that, you need

  • to restrict the vigor of the vines. So the take home message about terroir is that all

  • of the work we do about siting vineyards and babying these plants into making a wonderful

  • wine is controlling this natural vigor. And if you're growing the grapes in a climate,

  • on soils, bedrock and any of the other characteristics I'm going to describe that naturally help

  • reduce that vigor, then nature is acting as your friend instead of fighting you. So that's

  • a very simple explanation of what we're going to look at.

  • I'm going to illustrate this by looking at wines produced in three different parts of

  • the world Washington state, California, and two regions in France, Bordeaux and Burgundy.

  • Starting with Washington, we'll look at four factors.

  • If you look at this list, you'll say, "OK. Climate? I get that. Soils? That makes sense.

  • Volcanoes and glaciers? I don't see any volcanoes and glaciers in my wine." And so I have to

  • explain why this is so important, why it directly relates to the quality of the wine.

  • Let's start at the top with climate. On the left is how the world views the climate of

  • Washington state. If you think about Seattle or the Olympic rain forest, that is indeed

  • what it looks like. But on the right is what it's actually like where the grapes are grown,

  • where the vineyards are situated. And the reason for that huge difference between

  • those two images or parts of the state of Washington is easily visible on this map if

  • you're trained to read maps. That is, we have a mountain range, the Cascades, running north/south

  • right through here. And these are fairly tall mountains. The one that's probably most familiar

  • to people is Mt. Rainier. If you fly into Seattle on a clear day, which isn't all that

  • often, you'll fly right next to it. These mountains form a very effective rain

  • shadow. When people hear that word, they tend to think that this is a physical barrier.

  • And the moist clouds coming off the Pacific just sort of run into that and stop. They

  • can't make it past it. That's not what happens at all.

  • This is simple physics. The air rises up over the top of the mountain. As it the air rises,

  • it cools. Anybody who's been hiking in the high country knows that it gets cooler as

  • you go up. And as it gets cooler, the air can hold less moisture, so it rains. It drops

  • the moisture out. Then when the air goes over the top and back

  • down, this process reverses. Now the air warms up, but it's already dropped all of its available

  • moisture when it was going up. So now the air is sinking. It's getting warmer. It can

  • hold more moisture than it has. So there are places to the east of the Cascades

  • that not only are true deserts, there's places with negative evapotranspiration, negative

  • rainfall. It doesn't rain. It actually sucks up moisture from the ground as these hot winds

  • come down. That's why we have this zone in the middle of the state that forms in the

  • rain shadow behind the Cascades. This is one of the critical elements for producing fine

  • wines, being able to control the moisture availability to the grapes.

  • The other thing that happens with these big mountains is that they are stratovolcanoes,

  • and periodically they do this. This is Mt. St. Helens in 1980, erupting. And so they're

  • spewing huge amounts of ash into the air that then can fall back down on the landscape.

  • So this is a part. Turns out not to be a large part in Washington.

  • These eruptions are quite large. The ash column will go up vertically until it achieves neutral

  • buoyancy. It will be swept along by the jet stream. And a really large eruption in about

  • two weeks will entirely circle the globe. And that's interesting because we have this

  • ash raining out. It's a very small amount. That means that every place in the globe has

  • got a little bit of ash from these volcanoes. Next time you're visiting a fine vineyard

  • in France telling you that it's a wonderful, wonderful wine, you can say, "I taste something

  • in this wine. It's very familiar to me. It's Washington State!" If you know anything about

  • French culture you know that, "Ooh, that knife went in, and it's being twisted." I don't

  • mean to imply that it actually has any effect whatsoever on the taste of the wine, but it

  • is factually true that volcanic ash from these things is very widespread all over the globe.

  • The other thing that a trained geologist would see from this map is the effect of glaciers.

  • For those of you who haven't spent your whole life studying maps, I'll show you what that

  • is. This is what the world looked like 15,000 years ago. Glacial maximum. All of Canada

  • was covered by a very large mass of ice. And there were lobes that came down across the

  • present Canada/US border into the Great Lakes area.

  • If anybody from New York City, Long Island is the terminal moraine from one of those

  • big ice sheets. The ice came down, it melted, and it dumped out material, forming Long Island.

  • Washington State's ice came down into Puget Sound into this area. If you look a little

  • bit more closely, you can see a big lobe of ice coming in here. Lots of lobes of ice.

  • And the glaciers are important for two reasons. One, these can transport a huge amount of

  • material. So if we go to a modern region this is up in Alaska we can see glaciers coming

  • down the valleys. You can see all the dark material on top of that. That's rock, debris

  • that has cascaded down the slopes of the mountains onto the top of the glacier. They're being

  • transported. If we go down to the surface of the glacier,

  • you can see large rocks like this. This is what geologists do for fun. We ride these

  • galloping glaciers. They actually move pretty slowly. It's not that difficult.

  • But what's important about this is that is a very large chunk of rock. The only thing

  • that can move big chunks of rock like that is glacial ice. Wind can't move it. A river's

  • not going to be able to move a block that big. So, when we find these big blocks dumped

  • out onto the ground, even if there's no longer any ice there, it allows us to interpret that

  • there was ice. So this is the essence of geological reasoning,

  • of understanding how the processes work to be able to make an observation that if I go

  • into a vineyard or behind a Wal Mart and I see a big block of rock like that, I know

  • that the only process that could have gotten that rock there is glacial activity.

  • The other thing that's really important about these glaciers is they came down from Canada

  • and they blocked up lots of rivers, lots of different drainages in here. This is an artistic

  • rendition of what it was like. The one that's probably most important. A

  • lobe of this glacial ice blocked what is the present day Clark Fork River in Montana, and

  • it formed a lake behind this big tongue of ice that covered the western half of Montana

  • to a depth of about 1,000 feet. Sothis is a huge lake. If you're flying to Missoula,

  • you'll actually see the old beach lines up there on the mountain walls around Missoula.

  • And just forming a lake by itself wouldn't be of tremendous importance, except for one

  • little thing. As that lake got deeper and deeper and deeper, held in by this ice dam,

  • this lobe of ice, more physics. Ice? Water? Ice floats on water!

  • Eventually when that water got deep enough it caused the catastrophic failure of that

  • ice dam so that this huge body of water again, covering the western half of Montana suddenly

  • raced across the state of Washington and drained out. That's what's being illustrated here,

  • artistically. So it raced across the state of Washington out the channel of the present

  • day Columbia River, back flooded the Willamette Valley down in Oregon, and swooshed out into

  • the Pacific. The amount of water that flooded across the

  • state of Washington and we can calculate that it took somewhere between a week and two weeks

  • for that water to drain across the state is more than 10 times all the world's rivers

  • at flood stage simultaneously. Take the Amazon, take the Nile, take the Mississippi,

  • all the world's rivers, multiply it by 10, that's how much water was racing across the

  • state of Washington. That water was going very fast, and it had a tremendous impact

  • on the landscape. We can see this pretty easily with either

  • airplanes or flying over in a satellite. You can see what looked like river channels here.

  • These are farm fields. This is a satellite image and this is where the water was flowing.

  • There’s no rivers in this thing now. This was a very short lived again, one to two week

  • burst of water flooding across the state of Washington somewhere around 15,000 years ago.

  • It carved through all of the soil that used to be there. This water is flowing fast enough

  • it actually carved its way through the bedrock as well, channeling right through it. If we

  • go down to ground level we can see one of these.

  • So this dry valley in here, this has a geologic name called a coulee, and you've probably

  • heard of the biggest one of these in the United States. That's Grand Coulee, and the engineers

  • used this natural occurrence of this valley to build Grand Coulee Dam, and then they did

  • what Ma Nature did. They filled it up full of water behind the dam.

  • That's a farm down there. There's a road. This is a fairly wide valley, and there's

  • no river in there. This is very unusual. Normally when you have a valley and you have these

  • steep walls on both sides you'd be seeing some sort of creek or river flowing down the

  • middle. But there's not, because this, as I go back, is one of these little channels

  • where the water is flowing across the state. Now why is this important? Because that water

  • got rid of the soil that used to be there, stripped off a lot of things, mixed this all

  • up, and I'll show you what it did with it. This is another artistic rendition of what

  • that flood would have looked like so you can see big chunks of ice coming down along with

  • it. It's going over a series of breaks in the rocks forming large waterfalls, but there's

  • no water there anymore. Imagine that you went to Niagara Falls or

  • Iguaçu down in South America. Somebody just turned off the water, and you're looking at

  • Niagara Falls without any water. You'd have this big dry waterfall. Well, that's what

  • this is. There's no water there right now. It's called Dry Falls State Park in Washington

  • State, and it looks just like Niagara Falls without the water.

  • And all these things were a real mystery to people for a long time. They just couldn't

  • understand how could this have happened? And somebody actually put forth a very clear explanation

  • of how this happened. It was J. Harlen Bretz, and he was just heckled by all scientists,

  • because if you can imagine, go back 100 years, and you're going to invoke a large flood.

  • It has certain rings of science that we tend not to go there anymore.

  • Some other features from this huge flood...these are giant ripple marks. Again, for scale,

  • here's a four lane highway in the background. These ripple marks are just like the ripple

  • marks you would see on the beach or the side of a lake causing by water moving back and

  • forth, except these ripple marks have crests that are 100 feet high and are one to two

  • miles long. That's because the water was moving so fast

  • that it formed these huge features that on the ground you can't even recognize them.

  • They're just hills. When you get up in an airplane you see that these are in fact ripple

  • marks, and we can calculate how fast that water was moving, roughly about 100 miles

  • an hour. So if you were there when that flood occurred, all you can do is wax up your surfboard

  • and get ready, because you're not going to outrun it.

  • All that water is rushing across the state, and it eventually went through the modern

  • day channel, the Columbia River, and it went through several constrictions, several places

  • where the canyon walls narrowed, and this the most famous one. It's called Wallula Gap,

  • and these cliffs are between 500 and 800 feet high. This is the modern day Columbia River

  • flowing through it. So all that water was trying to go through

  • this constriction. It was like having a kink in your garden hose. It caused the water to

  • back up behind this. OK, now, there was no physical barrier. This was just more water

  • was coming through than could go through that valley, and what happened is that, here's

  • Wallula Gap down here, so the water was rushing across the state in this direction.

  • It back flooded the Yakima Valley, the Walla Walla Valley, and all this stuff here in the

  • Columbia Valley, so all this blue speckled, that's water. It caused that water to back

  • up, and it took, again, between one and two weeks for all that water to drain out.

  • Think about this water. It's racing across the state of Washington at 100 miles an hour.

  • It's picking up everything in its path so it's ripping up the soil. It's ripping up

  • rocks, cows, trees, you name it, Toyotas. Whatever was out there, it's all getting swept

  • along. Now it's ponding up behind here, temporarily, only for a couple days, a week at most.

  • The water now is not moving 100 miles an hour anymore. It's still for a few days. And all

  • those things that are being carried by the water, they're all going to get dumped out.

  • So where this water is, where it's shown temporarily as a lake, again just for a few days, is now

  • a deposit of all the mud and all the stuff that was being carried along by this flood.

  • And I want you to memorize this map, because the next map I'm going to show you is where

  • all the vineyards are. There's a one to one correlation. More than 95 percent of all vineyards

  • in Washington State are on these flood deposits. That's why when I listed those four things,

  • climate's important. If this was Greenland we wouldn't be growing wonderful vineyards.

  • But this glacial history is essential for why Washington State wines have the characteristics

  • they do. So what is actually happening in these valleys

  • that are being back flooded? When the water slows down it's depositing mud, and this is

  • a spectacular location. We can actually see what happened. Most of the Walla Walla Valley...so

  • if I go back to this one...so the Walla Walla Valley is this little valley down here. All

  • this mud was just deposited as flat layers. It's like on the bottom of a bathtub.

  • This ditch or canyon cutting through it actually formed in one weekend when an irrigation ditch...somebody

  • forgot to turn it off when they went home on Friday, and it overflowed, and it cut through

  • this. This mud is like a knife cutting through butter. When they came back on Monday they

  • went, "Oopsie," and that irrigation ditch cut to this canyon.

  • If you can't see it there's a person up there for scale. Most of Walla Walla is nice flat

  • mud layers like up on top. Without this canyon we wouldn't be able to see it. We know it's

  • there geologically. We wouldn't be able to see it. But in this one location you can actually

  • see it, and each one of these mud layers is the result of one of these big floods.

  • Now for those of you who are grammatically astute, you're saying, "Wait a second. He

  • said floods. Now looking at that I see lots of these layers. I might be willing to believe

  • him if there was this one big flood, but now he's asking us to believe that there were

  • dozens of these floods. Maybe he had the wine before he started this lecture...

  • [laughter] Larry: ...and he doesn't quite have it right.

  • What's actually happening? How did this form? The big ice lobe came down from Canada, blocked

  • the Clark Fork River. The water backed up slowly over a period of 100 to 200 years forming

  • this huge lake covering the western half of Montana until it was more than 1,000 feet

  • deep. It got deep enough that it eventually floated and broke up the ice dam.

  • The water raced across the state of Washington, took a week or so to get out to the Pacific,

  • and then what happened? The glacier ice slowly flowed back there, blocked up the Clark Fork

  • River again. The water started rising. That whole cycle takes anywhere between 150 and

  • 200 years to repeat. Each one of those layers is the result of

  • one of these flood cycles. So as long as that big ice sheet was covering Canada this is

  • kind of a predictable and unavoidable consequence, and for the geologists in the crowd, you've

  • probably observed that those layers are thickest down here, and they're getting a little bit

  • thinner. They're still pretty big. These are multi

  • meter thick layers of mud. That's because the first one that went through ripped up

  • all the mud that was there, and then the second flood went through that same channel and so

  • it was ripping up mud from the sidewalls of that, and so each one had less and less stuff

  • they could pick up as it was flooding through there.

  • So what happened after the flood? The water moved through. It dropped all this mud. The

  • water is gone. The sun comes out. The whole state is covered by this meter, couple of

  • meters, wet mud. It dries out. The wind picks up, and now you have hellacious dust storms.

  • This stuff is just loose mud all over half the state.

  • The wind picks it up and starts blowing it all over the place forming huge sheets of

  • sand dunes. So that material ends up on top. These fine layers in here, that's what's deposited

  • by the floods. These are what we call the slack water sediments. When the water slows

  • down it drops out the mud. The sun comes out. The wind starts blowing.

  • This material up on top is basically a big sand dune, and it's a sheet of sand that covers

  • most of the state. There's another geological term...loess is the name for a sheet of sand

  • that covers a very, very large area. It's not just one single sand dune.

  • This package of material from the windblown sand on top, the loess, that is windblown

  • reworking of this stuff which is the mud deposited from these floods, and that stuff is all the

  • soil and rocks that were covering the landscape that got ripped up by the water. This is the

  • substrate for almost all the vineyards in Washington State.

  • Some of them have more of the sand. Some of them have more of the slack water sediments.

  • Some of this is so deep that the roots never get down to bedrock. It's just growing in

  • this. So why is this important? Why am I spending 15 minutes of my precious time not talking

  • about the wine yet we'll get there. Trust me but about all this geology stuff?

  • Because, remember we started off it's controlling the vigor of the vines. So this is the media

  • that the vines are growing in. Let's think about what this stuff is. How much organic

  • material is in this? Pretty close to zero. A normal soil horizon develops, let's say

  • in Kansas over hundreds of thousands or millions or tens of millions of years, develops a very

  • organic rich part, which is why that's a great place for normal crops, why you can grow soybeans

  • and corn and everything else in Iowa and Kansas, because those are much older soils.

  • This stuff was all deposited within the last 15,000 years, and it was deposited by all

  • this water reworking it, stripping out any organic material that was there. If there

  • were decaying leaves, whoosh, that's all been taken away by the water. This is about as

  • sterile, as un nutritious stuff as you can find, and it's very well sorted grains of

  • what we call sand or silt, so that when there is water it drains right through it.

  • This material has very low nutrients, and it has very low water holding capacity. It

  • drains the water out. If your goal is to control the vigor of the vines, this is the best vigor

  • controlling stuff highly technical term you can imagine. That, in a nutshell, is why this

  • is really good. Your photographic memory now comes into play.

  • This is a map of the appellations. The technical term is the AVA, America Viticulture Area,

  • and there's several of them, the Yakima Valley here, the Walla Walla Valley down here, this

  • larger area of Columbia Valley. These are the legally defined areas where the grapes

  • are grown. And you can probably visualize that this Columbia

  • Valley is exactly the same area where all those slack water sediments were deposited,

  • where all those lakes were clotted up behind [indecipherable 24:23] Gap . It is literally

  • true that the vast majority of all Washington vineyards are growing on this glacially deposited

  • stuff, and it's not an accident for why that's so good for the wines.

  • And if you think about this in real estate terms location, location, location imagine

  • that you have a vineyard here producing really, really good wine versus a vineyard over there,

  • which is probably going to be incapable of producing commercial wine at all.

  • When I was a professor at Washington State, which was over here in Pullman, I would get

  • calls, because I would publish things about this research. I'd get calls every week from

  • a farmer saying, "You know, my neighbor has put in a vineyard, and he's getting $1,000

  • a ton for his stuff, and I'm selling my wheat for $5 dollars a bushel, and it's just not

  • quite the same. So can I plant these grapes and do as well as he's doing?"

  • I said, "Well, where are you located?" You can imagine this coming over the telephone,

  • "Well, my neighbor's vineyard is right there, and here's my farm over there." I'd say, "Well,

  • no, yours actually would be really terrible." "What do you mean it's really terrible? I'm

  • right next to this guy who's getting thousands of dollars for his stuff. What's wrong with

  • you? Are you an idiot?" I'd say, "No, I'm a geologist. That's a special kind of idiot."

  • [laughter] Larry:  So this is why it's so important

  • understanding why this has the effect it does, and then eventually we'll get to how it affects

  • the actual taste and quality of the wine. So we're going to look at the Walla Walla

  • area. Let's go back to that and point it out. So Walla Walla is one of these little sub

  • valleys that was back flooded by the big floods. What's being shown on this map, this is the

  • appellation boundary. See this black line sort of curls around here, and that's the

  • limit of the legally defined Walla Walla Valley, and this is a map showing different soil and

  • rock units. They all have different colors. These little black squares you can see here,

  • those are individual vineyards. Here is another thought experiment. We could

  • ask the question, "Do the vineyards on the brown stuff produce better or worse wine than

  • the vineyards on the yellow stuff, or the red stuff, or the green stuff?" It's a highly

  • technical question that we're posing, but it's pretty straightforward.

  • These are different soil rock units that had to do with this flood, and we're going to

  • go look at the vineyards on those different substrates to see if the plants are different.

  • The next step will be then to look at the wine that's produced from it, and ask whether

  • the wine is different. We are standing in one vineyard looking across

  • several of those colors, so this would be the red stuff. This is what's called a slack

  • water terrace. You can see the rows of the vines over there, and the flood plain is alluvium.

  • That's a different color. That was the yellow stuff on that map. That terrace back there

  • is the Pepperbridge Vineyard, one of the most famous vineyards in Washington state, produces

  • spectacular wine. It is impossible to grow grapes here on the

  • flood plain. What they grow there are onions. You may have heard of them, the Walla Walla

  • Sweets. They're actually quite famous, and they're great onions. But onions and wine

  • are two different things. Even though the distance from here to there is 50 feet, it's

  • a huge difference in what you can grow there and the qualities of it.

  • This is really different than if you were growing wheat or soybeans or corn, because

  • you're just not going to see that variability, and you're not going to see the connection

  • between what's in the ground and what eventually goes into the produce.

  • Now we're up in the vineyard at Pepperbridge. We're looking right down the row so let me

  • give you a short primer on grape vines and how this works. So here is the trunk of the

  • grapevine, and then the branches or they're called cordons are trained horizontally up

  • here on these trellis wires. This entire area here, the leafy area, is called the canopy.

  • And this is a beautiful vineyard that's in balance. What we mean by that is the amount

  • of leaf mass up there is in balance relative to the size of the grapevine to the root mass

  • in terms of being able to get these grapes ripe. If you have too much canopy due to too

  • much vigor of the vine so there's too much water and too much nutrients so the vine can

  • produce this huge mass of leaves, you won't be able to get the grapes right.

  • This is somewhat like Goldilocks. You want to have just the right amount not too little,

  • not too much and this is what a perfect vineyard looks like, and I want you to mentally photograph

  • the amount of canopy there, so the size of the trunks as we're looking down the rows,

  • and this grass is the middle is what they call a cover crop, and that's usually planted

  • to the keep the weeds and other things down. Now we're going to move about 100 feet across

  • one of those color boundaries on the original map, so a different substrate, and we're looking

  • right down the rows. There's an end post there. There's an end post there. These vines, their

  • roots actually have access to water. They can tap the water table because of what they're

  • growing on, and you can see the vigor of these, the balance or lack of balance between the

  • canopy and the vineyards. There's no way of getting those grapes right

  • even though we are 100 feet away from one of the best vineyards in Washington State.

  • This is a classic example of location, location, location. This is the actual owner of that,

  • and he planted this vineyard right next to Pepperbridge for all sorts of logical reasons

  • that, "Oh, boy, I'm going to be doing great," and he quickly figured out that this dog won't

  • hunt, that these grapes just were never ripe. And two years after we did the studies sort

  • of explaining why things weren't working the way he wanted, he ripped all this out and

  • started growing barley, because he just realized that it couldn't be done, OK? I go through

  • these examples because until you sort of see this and walk through it, it's really hard

  • to get in your mind, "Well, there's a patch of dirt, and there's a patch of dirt, so how

  • could they possibly be producing such different crops?"

  • I mean here you can see with your eyes these plants look different. We'll get into the

  • wine thing in a second. So here's another thing you can grow on. Where the water's moving

  • more quickly we don't get silt sized or sand sized grains. We are actually getting large

  • cobbles so the water's moving much faster. Here's a vineyard growing on these cobbles.

  • In fact, they named the vineyard the Cobblestone Vineyard. Again, if you're a gardener, and

  • you're growing tomatoes or cantaloupe, and you look at that, you go, "Oh, my god. There's

  • just no way that I could grow anything on that."

  • The person who planted this vineyard is a guy called Christophe Baron, and he's a Frenchman.

  • He's what they call a traveling winemaker. He had grown up on the family estate in France,

  • and he traveled all over the world working harvests different places. He knew eventually

  • he wanted to settle down someplace and have his own wine estate.

  • He looked at every place in the world, and he saw this area, and it all looked like this.

  • He said...his English is quite good, but he likes to ham up his French accent. He goes,

  • "Oh, I like this ground, because, oh, they're going to suffer here." They not only suffered

  • here. This land was worthless. You couldn't even grow apples there, which in Washington

  • State you can grow apples almost everywhere. He bought this for almost 10 dollars an acre

  • for the stuff because you just couldn't do anything with it, and he planted them. To

  • plant the vines he went out there with a crowbar, stuck the crowbar in the ground. He'd wiggle

  • it back and forth, and then he'd plant the bare rooted vines in there and just kind of

  • put the gravel back around the plants. Then he said he'd go out at night, and he'd

  • sing to them to try to just get them to go through the first year or so to grow there.

  • Whether the singing part's true I have no idea, but I can certainly vouch for this is

  • pretty hungry looking ground. If you look at it, here's a cross section through it.

  • We often dig trenches to be able to map from the surface.

  • You can see the roots going down through it. It's gravel all the way down. And most people

  • looking at this would go, "Oh, it looks just horrible." This is great. For growing grapes

  • you have to sort of retune your whole thinking mechanism.

  • OK, we're not growing tomatoes. We're not growing corn. We're growing grapes, and to

  • make high quality wine we need to restrict that vigor, and so this is good. It's good

  • because of the lack of nutrients. It's good because of the drainage characteristics of

  • it for the plants. Some other things we look at the air drainage,

  • how wind and air moves around the vineyard, is critically important for avoiding frost,

  • for changing the humidity and keeping out certain diseases. The presence of these turbines

  • up on the hill gives you a pretty good idea that there's a fair bit of wind here, and

  • a moderate amount of wind is a good thing. Hurricane force is not quite so good.

  • We can map that out, and so here is the same Walla Walla viticulture area, this outline,

  • and these things here that look like dart boards, these are called wind roses, and they're

  • telling us the velocity. As you go out the numbers get bigger. It's actually meters per

  • second, so it's telling us how fast the wind is blowing and what direction it's blowing

  • at different times of the year. So this is measured through a period of several

  • years so that individual vineyards, you could determine that this slope might be different

  • than this slope because of the way the air moves around them. You're going to have to

  • take measurements of observations, because at any one day you're just not going to know

  • what the air drainage looks like. The other thing on this map is to put contours

  • for precipitation. These dashed lines going through here, this is less than 20 centimeters

  • of rain so that's six to seven inches of rain a year. It's a desert.

  • There's a pretty strong gradient across this valley because we are going up in elevation.

  • By the time we get over here we're up to about 20 inches of rain a year, which is still a

  • lot, lot less than the East Coast, of course, but this is all well within the range of where

  • we want good grapes. Again, we've got these little black squares.

  • Those are individual vineyards. So the previous map I showed you with all those colors told

  • us about the soils and rocks that were there. Here we're integrating in the wind conditions,

  • and the precipitation, and all that is part of this thing I call "terroir" that affects

  • the desirability of a particular place. We'll look at one more before we zip across

  • the ocean to other venues, and that is this tiny little red thing here called Red Mountain.

  • You might ask, "Well, why should we care about Red Mountain?" This one little patch of ground

  • produces arguably the finest wines, not only in Washington State, but in most years, in

  • the world. So some of the Cabernets and Syrah's from

  • this area have won every award you can win, so these are really, really special wines.

  • Some of them are pretty pricey wines. Here's another, not quite a thought experiment, but

  • when I was doing this research I was a professor. Professors aren't paid a huge amount so I

  • had this horrible decision. "How am I ever going to taste these really good, really expensive

  • wines since I can't afford to buy them? Research!" So for the scientists in the world there is

  • hope. We designed some research experiments where we went in there to do the same sort

  • of documentation we did for Walla Walla Valley, and here we actually took it all the way to

  • the step of making the wines. Of course, we had to sample those wines, and some of the

  • wines that had to be repeated, we sampled for statistical purposes.

  • So you know how to do this now. You don't even need me to tell you this. I'm just going

  • to really speed it up. Here's a geology map. We've got different colors. This black outline

  • is the AVA, the appellation for Red Mountain, and within that we could do the thought experiment.

  • You know different colors, different vineyards, will they have different effects?

  • Here is the oblique area photograph of Red Mountain, which is this ridge back here, and

  • draped over the top of it is a color infrared aerial photograph. Color infrared has different

  • colors and it corresponds to chlorophyll, the ability of the plant to do photosynthesis,

  • so the bright red areas are actually living matter, and the green areas are the lack of

  • things. It's sagebrush. You can very clearly see the vineyards here.

  • The same thought experiment do different vineyards on different substrates have different characteristics

  • for the grapes and then for the wine produced from them? This area is right in the middle

  • of Washington State. So what happened to this 15,000 years ago?

  • These floods I was talking about right through this area. Here is my artistic rendition of

  • what it looked like. This is why I went into geology rather than into fine art. Here comes

  • the water swooping around Red Mountain, and as that water continued to flow this is the

  • high water mark. The standing water was never over the top

  • of Red Mountain. When the flood first came through I'm sure there was a huge standing

  • wave over the top of this, so if you're a surfer this would have been a good place to

  • stand. Get you surfboard waxed up and just got to catch that wave as it's going by and

  • then get off when you get to Japan, and you're all done.

  • So what am I showing you here in this wonderful artistic drawing? The water is racing around

  • this ridge right here, so we're getting a back eddy. If we got any trout fisherman you

  • know exactly where this is going. This is slightly calmer water here, much faster water

  • over there. These big black dots represent big icebergs

  • that are being carried along in the flood waters, and trapped in that ice are lots of

  • boulders and sand and silt, and when some of those icebergs ground, when they get stuck

  • along here at the high water mark, when this water recedes after a week or so, then those

  • big icebergs melt out and they drop their suspended load.

  • Now we're on the ground looking up at Red Mountain, and you can see that there are some

  • little things here with arrows pointing to them. Those are what we call glacial erratics.

  • Erratics is they don't belong there. They were dumped out by this flood, and glacial

  • because they were transported initially by glaciers in the ice.

  • And they may not look very big from here, but if we go up closer to them, this is what

  • those boulders are, and there are two observations you can make as a trained geologist. One,

  • this is a fairly rounded boulder so something had to knock all the sharp edges off that,

  • and that was the tumbling around both in the ice and this being carried along in the iceberg.

  • Two it's bright white, and it's bright white because that's a big block of marble. And

  • there is no marble within 500 miles of this spot. We can go up into Canada and find the

  • outcrop that that boulder came from that was transported by the glaciers in the big ice

  • dam. The ice dam broke. The big flood raced across the state forming all the things that

  • the vines can grow in, but leaving these boulders as evidence for the geologist saying, "This

  • is what happened here." So to study these things in detail we either

  • dig trenches or we use natural exposures, so you can see the vineyard up there. Those

  • roots are going down. Here in this cut we can see the top part right in here. It has

  • sort of a vertical structure. That's the loess. That's that windblown sand material.

  • Then down below it this is all the water deposited flood material, and some of it's finer grained

  • like in here, and there's lenses of coarser material, and that's where the water was swirling

  • around. But to look at this in more detail...This is what geologists do. We make detailed maps

  • of thisSo we can actually map out the grain size distribution.

  • An individual plant, its roots are going into different sized material, and that's going

  • to affect how that plant grows. And some of those coarser lenses of material, so the water

  • moved faster, is where the groundwater can move more quickly through here. This is very

  • arid climate so that water evaporates and deposits calcium carbonate...we call caliche.

  • This not only has a different drainage structure to it, that calcium carbonate that's deposited

  • over hundreds or thousands of years affects the pH of the water. So here's one more effect

  • we're looking at the mountain, water, the nutrients, and now the pH or the alkalinity

  • of that water. That all affects how the plants are going to grow.

  • So here comes yet another one of these wonderful scientific thought experiments. So there's

  • the outline of a particular vineyard, Ciel du Cheval. It's one of the most famous vineyards

  • there. These grapes sell for thousands of dollars a ton, and by showing the different

  • colors are these different grain size of material I just showed you in the last slide, so we

  • can map them out. In terms of soil series these are given different

  • names. We don't need to worry about the names the Hezel, the Scooteney, the Warden but what

  • you can see is that we have vines growing, planted, those vineyards right across all

  • three of these. This is the same vineyard, the same grape varieties, the same sunshine,

  • the same rain, the same wind, the same grower, the same management style.

  • Everything is identical expect for what's in the ground that these plants are growing

  • on. So this is the first time we're doing controlled experiments of the grapes that

  • are grown on here and then wine made from those grapes, from these different spots,

  • asking once again a very simple question, "Are the grapes, and does the wine made from

  • these three different substrates, taste different?" That's a fairly simple thing to do. It's a

  • much different question than, "Is this good wine or bad wine?" That involves some level

  • of taste, but anybody in this room could do this A versus B and say, "Are these the same

  • or are they different?" And we do that repeatedly, and there's a whole scientific protocol for

  • how you do this to make it statistically valid, and some of these we have to sample over and

  • over again. So this is what it looks like on the ground

  • in one of the substrates. We're looking right down the rows. These are planted on one meter

  • spacings. They're really close together because these are really, really high quality vineyards,

  • and this is about as close to perfect as you can get in terms of the canopy and the trunks.

  • You'll notice the ground cover here is brown. That's because it's very dry, so this isn't

  • the bright green we were seeing at the other vineyard. Now we're going to move about 20

  • feet across one of those boundaries, the same day, and it looks like this. Now for those

  • of you who are trained observers, which is everybody in this room or we wouldn't let

  • you in through the door, you can see two things immediately.

  • One, the ground cover is green here, so somehow it's getting water, and I guarantee you they're

  • not going out there to water this to make the grass grow. And two, the vines, the canopy,

  • is much bigger. We actually see some of these growing together.

  • If you don't go through there and trim those back this will very quickly turn into a pretty

  • dense jungle. Not nearly as bad as the one I showed you from Walla Walla, but this has

  • a different level of vigor than the one next to it. I was showing you on the map those

  • different colors. This is the result in terms of what happens with the plants.

  • Now when I say that you want the vines to suffer, just like Goldilocks, this is too

  • much suffering, and so now we have crossed yet another one of those boundaries to a different

  • color, and here there's not enough water holding capacity and not enough nutrient holding capacity

  • in terms of clays for these plants to really survive at all. This is too much suffering.

  • So how do we go about quantifying it? I've shown you pictures of things. I know you can

  • see with your eyes this plant has more leaves, that one has less leaves. So when we get in

  • there, and we're doing this technically, and in the winter all these plants are pruned

  • back, and we can weigh the cuttings from that. That's how we can quantify the vigor of the

  • plant. So it's not just going, "Oh, yeah, there's more leaf area over there."

  • We actually measure that. This gets technical in a hurry, but we average the cuttings from

  • different samples. We repeat this over and over for a three year period so we can average

  • out three different weather cycles so to document, and in fact these have different amounts of

  • vigor. Next thing we do is we look at the grapes

  • themselves that are growing here. So now a little short seminar on grape physiology.

  • Why do we care about what the grapes look like? Here are two different bunches grown

  • on those two different substrates of the vineyards I was showing you, and the one on the left

  • is a larger bunch of grapes than the one on the right, and the individual grape berries

  • are larger on the left than on the right. So you can see there are differences or what

  • we can call vigor of growth in the size of the grapes. Why is that important? How does

  • that connect to this thing we call the science of good taste? Well, if we think about an

  • individual grape, all of the color, all of the anthocyanins are in the skin.

  • The grape is this thin skin. It's got juice, which is basically a sugar solution and a

  • few seeds in there, and as the grape gets bigger and bigger, the volume of liquid relative

  • to the skin, which is the circumference, so those of you who are geometrically astute,

  • it's varying as the square of the radius, the cube of the radius for the volume.

  • As that grape gets bigger, the amount of skin, which would be the color and most of the flavor,

  • the pigment, and the anthocyanins, the tannins, the things that give the wine the structure

  • that fill your mouth, that's all concentrated in the skins. As that grape gets bigger, you'll

  • have less and less of that. So as the vine suffers, as we get smaller

  • grapes on the right, the wine produced from that is going to be a more intense wine, and

  • assuming that all the other variables we're playing with in terms of this is a nice flavor

  • that we like, it will be much more of that nice flavor in the one on the right than the

  • one on the left. And if we have a flavor that's too strong,

  • then the one on the left will be better because it will have a less intense of that not so

  • good flavor. I'm using highly technical terms, but I think you get the drift. You can taste

  • these things. You can see differences. This is what I mean by the grapes are different

  • from these different substrates that the plants are growing on.

  • But this we did beyond just looking at the grapes so then the next step is taking this

  • into a research winery. You see the pink label on the right, the yellow label on the left.

  • These are different batches from different things we could map in the field, and they

  • go into the research winery. We know it's a research winery because we're

  • treating every single batch the same. This is why this it's a scientific experiment.

  • And so it's the exact same yeast, the exact same temperature, fermentation. We hold everything

  • constant. The other way you can tell it's a research

  • winery is that all the equipment is labeled, "Research," on the side, and that's because

  • they're right next to a commercial winery, and anybody who's ever run a lab knows that

  • your lab equipment’s always disappearing. You never know where it goes. Little gremlins

  • come in the night and your lab equipment disappears, so they label everything with, "Research,"

  • in the research winery. You can see all those different stainless

  • steel tanks back there, and so each one of our batches can be fermented separately, made

  • into separate wine under commercial wine making conditions.

  • And we can do all sorts of technical measurements of that, and I won't go into this in any detail.

  • We can measure the pH. The TA is the titratable acidity. Brix is a fancy word for the sugar

  • content of the grapes. These are all things that affect the quality of the wine, and particularly

  • the balance between the acid and the sugar are critical for the quality of the wine.

  • So we can measure these things, and we can ask the question, "Are they the same or are

  • they different?" for the exact same grape variety grown on these two different substrates.

  • We can measure this. We write up in our terroir papers.

  • So that's all in Washington State. Now we're going to motor through. We're going to look

  • at two other areas to see how they are different. We're going to jump down to California looking

  • at the influence of tectonics and alluvial fans on this. This is an aerial view looking

  • at the Bay area, and for the geologists in the crowd, I don't need to tell you what all

  • these linear looking things are. So this is the San Andreas Fault cutting through

  • here and various splays of it. If we look at Napa County up there on top, there are

  • splays of the San Andreas, the main strand of the San Andreas is coming right through

  • here, right through there, up to Point Reyes, in through there. So these are strands of

  • movement along the plate boundary that is the San Andreas Fault.

  • As we go up into Napa we can see that there are individual valleys. There's Napa Valley

  • with fairly straight walls to the mountains. These aren't really tall mountains, not like

  • the Cascades. We have a flat floored valley, and these are strands of the faults, subsidiary

  • faults. So each one of these is a fault bounded valley.

  • Why is that important? Because the valley floor has sunk down, and the walls are going

  • up. Erosion is occurring off those walls forming what we call alluvial fans. So now we are

  • looking at the side of this valley. Here's the mountain and the ridge over there. It's

  • got a creek coming down here, and it's dumping out onto the valley floor.

  • And there's a slight slope to this floor, and then this cutaway cartoon you can see

  • illustrated that what is being dumped out by the creek every time it rains and water

  • cascades across here, we get coarser material dumped out here where the water first goes

  • to the valley floor, then it gets finer grained as we go in this direction.

  • Hopefully what you can see is that a vineyard here is going to be on slightly different

  • stuff than a vineyard here. Let's imagine that you were, oh, let's say a Silicon Valley

  • tycoon. You just made a billion dollars on your latest startup, and you decided that,

  • "I want to be a winemaker. I want to have my own winery."

  • It's a dream that a lot people have, and there's a little joke in the wine industry, "The best

  • way to make a small fortune in the wine industry is to start with a large one, and you'll pretty

  • soon have a small one." [laughter]

  • Larry:  Assume you had the large fortune, and you go here, and you go to your real estate

  • agent. Now it's probably going to be a real estate agent who specializes in vineyards.

  • You say, "I've got more money than sense, and I want to buy a vineyard here." The real

  • estate agent says, "You're in luck." Anyone who's ever dealt with real estate agents you

  • know exactly where this is going. "I just happen to have a really special property.

  • In fact, our newest hire..." I wouldn't tell the story about...OK. You're out here, and

  • you're buying this, and let's say the real estate agent says, "This vineyard right here

  • is very famous. Say it's owned by Francis Ford Coppola, or Robert Mondavi, somebody.

  • "I just happen to have the vineyard right next to it. I can get it for you for a steal.

  • Five million dollars and I can get you this vineyard. It's the size of a postage stamp,

  • but five million dollars I can get it for you, and you'll be right next to him." And

  • location, location, location, you think, "That's great." If you're buying a house, I'm right

  • next to the school, or the restaurant, or wherever I want to be. I'm right next to this

  • great vineyard. But your eagle eye has spotted something.

  • You go, "Wait a second. What's this red line here?" That's the outline of the alluvial

  • fan that tells us the material in here is really different from the material on the

  • other side of it. You point this out to the real estate agent.

  • You say, "Wait a second. I went to a geology lecture, and this is an alluvial fan, and

  • that property you're trying to sell me is on the other side of the alluvial fan." The

  • agent's eyes get really big, and looks at you and says, "Oh, El Diablo, go away." Real

  • estate agents don't like it when you know more about it than they do.

  • So the point of this is what it's growing on makes a really big difference, and if we

  • take away the geology, and you're just looking at this, there are vineyards, and there are

  • vineyards. They're all in Napa Valley, very famous place, and you say, "Oh, that's great.

  • I have a vineyard in Napa Valley." There are really big differences on the scale

  • of terroir that hopefully you can now see and begin to understand.

  • There's a lot of people who've gone there into Napa Valley. This is probably one of

  • the most famous. This is the joint venture between the Mondavi family, arguably the most

  • famous wine producing family in the United States and the Rothschild family from France,

  • certainly one of the more famous and richer families of France. They got together to make

  • a winery to produce one wine, Opus One, which sells for very, very high prices. They did

  • everything the very best they could. So here they are. Price is no object. They're

  • going to Napa and they're saying, "I want the very best place." Where do they locate

  • their Opus One vineyard? Right there on the fan. There's the apex of the fan, and they

  • put it right there. What's going to be there? OK? This is the closest part of the fan to

  • where the headwaters come out of the mountain, so it's going to be the coarsest material.

  • It's going to have the best drainage and the fewest finds, the organic material for the

  • nutrients. They put this right in the right place, because they were French. They knew

  • about this terroir stuff. It's a French word. Here's another one. This is the Stag's Leap

  • Vineyard. I show you this one for one simple reason. You've probably heard either about

  • the movie "Mondovino" or the famous tasting that occurred in 1970's in France. This was

  • a watershed moment no pun intended in the wine world, because to make a long story short,

  • we had a series of wines from different places around the world. All the judges were French

  • wine writers, vintner winemakers, restaurant owners; all the judges were French.

  • It was a blind tasting. They did this. At the end of the day, two wines from California

  • won. This was transformative, because up until that point, even though lots of people knew

  • better, it was a common knowledge that, well, you can produce wine in lots of different

  • places, but really the only good wine is there in France.

  • And so when this happens at a blind tasting and you can't say, "Well, you know, it was

  • the American judges. They didn't know what they were doing." So it was the French judging

  • their very best wines against that and so the Cabernet sauvignon that won that came

  • from Stag's Leap. Just like I went to Red Mountain, why would

  • I want to go study this? Well, this is the most famous wine in the world. If you go there,

  • and you look at it very closely, this is what's happening alluvial fan. So these are different

  • vineyards within Stag's Leap. This is where the drainage is coming down from the mountain.

  • These are individual debris flows that we can map out in the alluvial fan within this

  • broader thing, the alluvial fan. If we dig our little trenches there, just

  • back hoe trenches into the vineyard, and you have to have pretty established research to

  • go and convince somebody to let you dig up their vineyard with a back hoe. Trust me.

  • They don't normally like that to happen. But once you explain why you're doing this, and

  • what you'll learn from it, and hopefully you can see that each one of those trenches they

  • look really different. The same thought experiment. Is the wine produced

  • on substrate A better or worse, different, than what's on B?

  • Now we're going to jump across the ocean. We're coming down the home stretch here. You

  • saw two different places with really different characteristics. Now we're in the motherland.

  • Now we're in France, and we're going to start off in Bordeaux looking at the influence of

  • glaciation. You're probably thinking, "Wait a second.

  • I've been to France. I didn't see no stinking glaciers there. So what are you talking about

  • glaciers?" Well, back during the glacial maximum when

  • all of Canada was covered by ice, the high country and the Pyrenees, the mountain range

  • between Spain and France, and the Massif Central? in the central part of France all had big

  • ice sheets on them. So all that material this is what the Pyrenees look like. That was all

  • covered by ice. And this map and the location map up there.

  • Bordeaux is here. The Massif Central is a high plateau up in here, all covered by ice.

  • Both the Pyrenees down here and Massif Central fed lots of glacial debris down into this

  • estuary that is Bordeaux. And so these are various vineyards, what they

  • refer to as the Left Bank and the Right Bank. These are all storied, very, very famous places.

  • You will recognize some of the terms Margaux, Pomerol, Graves in here.

  • Let me show a cross section through this. The water, the river, sound, is here. These

  • are the slopes where these very famous vineyards are. Graves, if we have any French speakers,

  • "graves" in French means "gravel," OK? You know where this is going.

  • What was coming down from those glaciers? It was all this gravelly material. Not just

  • gravel, but gravel is in specific what we call stratigraphic layers. All of the top

  • vineyards this is another wonderful story. Back in the late 1800s, all of the vineyards

  • in Bordeaux were classified. They basically made a classification from

  • what they thought were the very best to the very worst. And one could argue about whether

  • they got everything exactly right, but what they call the "first growths," the number

  • one vineyards sell for ridiculous prices, hundreds, in some cases thousands of dollars

  • a bottle. And all of the first growths are on these stratigraphic gravel layers.

  • Here's the kicker. There's a particular gravel there, called le Gunz gravel. It's le Gunz

  • high terroir. It's right there. Hold it up there. Château d'Yquem is probably the most

  • expensive wine in the world. It also sells for hundreds or thousands of dollars a bottle,

  • but it sells in these little tenth bottles. You get to pay $1,000 for a tenth bottle.

  • And these are very sweet dessert style wines, and they're grown on a very special substrate

  • that one gravel terrace. Every single one of the top vineyards are on, not just these

  • gravel terraces, but on a particular stratigraphic gravel terrace.

  • If you go visit the wine areas in France, you're probably not got to hear this story,

  • because they're not geologists. You're getting it now. This is what it looks like, in the

  • field. There's the Gunz gravel. Here's a nice Merlot plant growing on that gravel.

  • Does this look familiar? Remember seeing this in Washington State? I said, "Christophe Baron,

  • this traveling winemaker, traveled all over all the world. Could have a vineyard anywhere

  • in the world he wanted, and he came to Washington State. He saw that gravel, which, when I first

  • showed it to you, I'm sure you're all thinking, "This guy's nuts. He's been drinking the wine

  • before the lecture again!" And here it is. Now you begin to see the cause

  • and effect. It's not that you're going to taste this gravel. You don't taste the gravel.

  • You're not tasting what's in the rock. What you are doing is you're tasting the result

  • of the terroir, the environment in which the grapes are grown, that affects the amount

  • of canopy. It affects the acid sugar balance. It affects all those things that I was describing.

  • It mainly comes down to the quality of the wine.

  • The very last thing, we're going to Burgundy. Now we're getting to the really pricy stuff.

  • This is my very favorite picture in the whole world. I'm standing in a vineyard looking

  • at three different vineyards going up the slope. This is the very last picture I'm going

  • to show you after a cross section. These have names Chevalier, Montrachet, Bâtard

  • Montrachet. These vineyards have been growing in the same place for almost 1,000 years.

  • That vineyard, right there, has been growing there for almost a millennium. These stone

  • walls separating them are there because that same vineyard has been growing there in that

  • same place with that same wall for 1,000 years. The wine from this vineyard averages close

  • to a $1,000 a bottle. We come over here to the Montrachet. It's

  • much cheaper. You can pick this up for two or three hundred dollars a bottle. You cross

  • that stone wall. You cross that stone wall to this one, Bâtard Montrachet. Oh, you can

  • pick this up for $125. Where I'm standing, across one more stone wall, is vin ordinaire.

  • You can go to the local cafe and buy this for 75¢ a liter.

  • That huge difference in certainly cost of the wine, is not a real good correlation between

  • the cost and the quality. That's not where I'm going, but perceived differences in the

  • wine between things that are adjacent. We're going to ask that million dollar question

  • one more time, "Why?" This is our initial thought experiment that I started this lecture

  • off with. Two vineyards right next to each other, actually three vineyards right next

  • to each other. What is different? You draw a cross section through this, which

  • geologists love to do. Here's the cross section. Here are those vineyards up there and down

  • at the bottom. I've just blown this up. So here's Chevalier over here. Limonge. That

  • stone wall is right here. The subsurface this is a fault separating that rock type from

  • that rock type, with different soil horizons. When these vineyards were planted 1,000 years

  • ago, the science of geology did not exist. There was not a human on earth who knew what

  • a fault was, even if they had tried to look. Geology did not exist.

  • So here's a case where those vineyards are where they are, because over hundreds of years

  • of human experimentation of making wine and trying it over the years, through generations,

  • multiple generations of people, they decided that for my taste, this one is a whole lot

  • better than that one, and it corresponds exactly to these geological features that we can see

  • in the subsurface. And again, this comes into nutrients and water

  • and all the other things that come together with terroir. And so that's the end of the

  • "Science of Good Taste." If this was a laboratory course, we would now go into the drinking

  • part. We can't, so I thank you for your attention.

  • Transcription by CastingWords p.

Larry Meinert:  Since this is going to be a science talk, let's start with a little

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美味しさの科学-地質・ワイン・食 (The Science of Good Taste -- Geology, Wine and Food)

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    江東潣 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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