Wine & Spirits - June 2017 - 96

BOOKS

Wine by Rock

by Jamie Goode

The world of wine goes through revolutions. The early 1990s saw the cult of the winemaker. Flying
winemakers were the heroes, taking their New World expertise to the underdeveloped Old World. The
vineyard didn't matter as much: the hand of the skilled winemaker could transform average grapes
into something special. Then in the noughties, we began to realize that the vineyards do matter after
all, and viticultural consultants became as well paid as their winemaking-consultant peers. But it is
only in the last few years that we have become intensely interested in soils. Now, vineyard workers
curse the peril of backhoe pits or calicantes hidden like land mines in every second row, as everyone
tries to work out just how promising their soils are.

The Dirty Guide to Wine:
Following Flavors from Ground
to Glass by Alice Feiring
(Countryman Press, 2017; $25)
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WINE & SPIRITS

So The Dirty Guide to Wine: Following Flavors from
Ground to Glass is timely. The fourth book from
natural-wine champion Alice Feiring, it's essentially
a wine guide, but with a real difference: instead of
organizing wines by grape variety, or region of origin, they are clustered together by soil type.
It's also very brave, because the link between soil
type and wine flavor is still mysterious and controversial. Celebrated viticulturists claim that climate
trumps soil type in shaping the flavor of a wine, and
the consensus has been that if soil type has any influence, it is through the effect of its water-holding
properties, rather than soil chemistry. Yet there are
others who claim that they can, in some way, taste
soil type in the wine: Could it be that soil chemistry
affects more than just the hydric status of vines?
"Consideration of the type of soil a grape vine is
grown in has become almost mocked in the mainstream wine world," writes Feiring in the introduction to her book, "yet it is essential to the way the
wine tastes and ages."
To match soil type and wine flavor is one of the
holy grails of wine science research. So far, we just
have a few tantalizing clues. Feiring attempts this
task in her book, but intriguingly this isn't a scientific
or technical work. Instead, it is written in a friendly,
slightly folksy tone designed to appeal to wine novices or geeks early on in their wine journey. The book
begins with a readable introduction to soils, followed
by a guide to wine tasting, just as you might find in
any introduction-to-wine text. Then it tackles the
world of wine, split into three broad types of soils:
volcanic, sedimentary and metamorphic.
Volcanic is split into basalt, transitional volcanic
and granite; the sedimentary section is dominated
by limestone, with silex, shale, heavy clay, gravels
and diatomaceous earth; and metamorphic includes
schist, slate, amphibolite and gneiss. Each section
highlights regions with these soils, as well as producers that Feiring recommends.
This is a clever approach, but it has some weaknesses. The first is due to the complex nature of
the topic covered and the lack of any real data: it's
JUNE 2017

almost entirely anecdote. The second is that Feiring's
worldview is very much a binary one, with good versus bad and very little in between. She's searching for
the plain and simple truth, whereas in the real world,
as someone once said, the truth is rarely plain and
it is never simple. "It is my heartfelt belief that the
only wines that truly manage to communicate place
and vintage are those that start with at least organic
viticulture and then have only grapes, with perhaps
minimal sulfite addition," states Feiring. This rules
out large swaths of the wine-producing world, and
along with it, most (I suspect) readers' great wine
experiences.
Feiring does a good job in describing some of her
favorite wine regions and producers, as well as the
soils she encounters along her travels. But what she
fails to do is make any convincing case for matching
soil type and wine flavor. Readers looking for a guide
to how soil shapes flavor will be left disappointed: if
soils are as important as she states, they will want to
know how and why.
As an example, here's her commentary on the connection between the Kimmeridgian limestone of
Chablis-one of the most lauded terroirs of all-and
the flavor of the wine. "It is the Kimmeridgian soil
that is said to give the wines that legendary flint flavor. In fact, some say if you break off a piece of the
comma-shaped fossils, the aroma is that very flint
that can come in the wines. Is this just a trumped-up
myth? You'll have to see for yourself, but you'll have
to find a winemaker who works organically with little
or no sulfur and farms on soils riddled with those
shells." While Feiring offers specific producer recommendations, she ducks the challenge of trying to
explain how the specific soil types influence the flavor of the wine.
Nonetheless, it's great to see the subject of soils
and wine being given proper attention. After last
year's Volcanic Wines by John Szabo, MS, this is the
second recent title to focus on soils and wine, and I
have the feeling that more will follow. An attempt
to organize the wine world through soils instead of
grape varieties is so much more interesting. ■

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - June 2017