Author: TERROIR Editorial

Riedel sells thirty-plus varietal glasses. A 2015 Tokyo sniff-cam study and 2001 research show how many wine glass shapes actually matter.

Whole-cluster fermentation is Pinot Noir’s most consequential cellar decision: stems in or stems out, no third option. What the technique really delivers.

Vin jaune is France’s most misunderstood premium white: Savagnin aged six years under a veil of yeast in the Jura, with the 620ml clavelin proving the loss.

Cover crops in vineyards sequester up to four times the carbon of typical cropland. The science, the trade-offs, and what leading regions now require.

The math is not arbitrary, the multiplier is not uniform, and the second-cheapest bottle is not the trap. How sommeliers actually build restaurant wine markup.

In the autumn of 2001, Michel Chapoutier walked into a concrete workshop on the eastern edge of Burgundy and asked the family who ran it whether they could build him an egg. The workshop belonged to Nomblot, a manufacturer founded in 1922 that had spent eight decades producing cement cisterns for the storage tanks under Burgundian cellars. Marc Nomblot was the second generation. The shape Chapoutier wanted was unusual: roughly two metres tall, three thousand litres, walls fifteen centimetres thick, and tapered at both ends into a shell of unreinforced cement. There was no rebar. There was no internal coating.…

In a private cellar somewhere in Southern California, a magnum of Domaine Georges Roumier Bonnes-Mares 1923 sat on a rack for years before anyone looked closely at the label. The bottle was beautiful: the glass weighted correctly for the period, the capsule oxidised in a way that suggested it had not been disturbed. The problem was not the bottle. The problem was that Domaine Georges Roumier did not begin producing wine until 1924. Whatever was in the magnum, it was not what the label said it was, because the label described a wine that had never existed. That single impossibility,…

At Romanée-Conti, the most-priced vineyard on earth, the cellar team buries cow horns packed with manure across the monopole each autumn. The horns are dug up in spring, the contents stirred into water for an hour in alternating directions, and the resulting suspension sprayed at homeopathic dilution across roughly 1.8 hectares of Pinot Noir. The procedure has a number (Preparation 500), a regulator (Demeter International), and a price implication that no serious chemist has been able to explain. Aubert de Villaine has been doing it from the late 1980s. The wines, by every blind-tasting account that matters, have not gotten…

Somewhere around 2011, a generation of American Chardonnay drinkers stopped ordering Chardonnay. The phenomenon had a name, ABC (Anything But Chardonnay), and it had a flavor: butter. Specifically, the cushion of warm-popcorn richness that had become the house style of California Chardonnay across the previous decade. The wines were not flawed; they had simply converged on a single profile so completely that drinkers began ordering around them. What very few of those drinkers knew, and what the producers knew exactly, is that the butter was not coming from oak. It was coming from a bacterium. That bacterium is Oenococcus oeni,…

The tannin meets the fat and does not bind to it. That, in one sentence, is why most of what dinner-party hosts believe about red wine and cheese is wrong. The mental model most drinkers carry from steakhouse pairings, that tannin “cuts through” richness, depends on a specific chemical interaction: the polyphenols in red wine binding to the proteins in muscle fiber, softening both the wine’s astringency and the meat’s chew. A wedge of triple-cream Brie is not muscle fiber. A twenty-four-month Comté is not muscle fiber. The pairing logic that works on a ribeye does not transfer to the…