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,…
Author: TERROIR Editorial
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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…
The crown cap is the tell. Lift a bottle of pétillant naturel out of an ice bucket and what stares back is the same closure used on a bottle of lager: a corrugated metal cap, pressed cold, no cage, no foil, no wire muselet doing its slow argument with the cork. Pop it and the bottle may answer with a polite hiss or a fountain of foam halfway up the table; the wine inside may arrive clear or hazed with lees, dry or faintly off-dry, six atmospheres of pressure or barely two. Champagne built its reputation on the opposite of…
The white soils of Chablis are not soil in any ordinary sense. Pick up a handful of the chalky marl from a Premier Cru slope above the Serein, and what you are holding is a Jurassic seabed: roughly 150 million years of compressed shell, much of it the fossilized cup of a small oyster called Exogyra virgula. That fossil bivalve appears again on the Sancerre côte two hundred kilometers to the southwest, and again, in coarser form, in the Kimmeridgian outcrops that surface from Champagne through the Loire. The geologists call it the Kimmeridgian seam. The vignerons call it luck.…