Terroir: Just a Marketing Tool?

On a food & culture listserv to which I often eagerly eavesdrop, the hotly debated mot du jour is terroir, French for “tasting of the soil.” Arguments and rebuttals have been bouncing back and forth over whether believers of terroir’s gospel (known as terroirists—don’t mispronounce that!) are onto something, or whether the whole notion smacks of quackery and baseless marketing. Terroir circumscribes all the possible factors that might influence wine or food made in a particular region: soil, climate, geographical location, water table wind direction, humidity—in short, everything that contributes to the macro, meso, and micro-cosm alleged to give products their character. Terroirists argue that a wine, cheese, bread, or any other natural product made in one place with local ingredients will necessarily taste different than one made elsewhere, and that the way it tastes specifically reflects its source. It’s one rationale people give for the superiority of New York pizza (Catskills tap water), Burgundian wine (limestone soil), Irish washed-rind cheeses (salty air), Danish mushrooms (slow growing season), and so on.

“The question that has gone begging,” notes one unbeliever, “is how much of this faddish interest in terroir—particularly when it comes to wine—is marketing, and how much of it is real?”

Sure, terroir has been exploited to sell things. It tugs at the heartstrings—the word goes far past the biological, evoking geography, patriotism, nostalgia, and other things deeper than dirt. Personally, I buy it (often literally).

Terroir as a marketing tool has garnered the most currency in France and French-speaking areas like Belgium and Quebec, where the notion is, for the most part, taken as a given. Even large supermarkets typically have an aisle or small display of produits de terroir, where small-batch jams, meats, cheese and the like are locally sourced and sold, perhaps only in that particular branch of the supermarket. Sure, it’s probably more work for the corporate buyer to keep tabs on so many microscopic variables (they might delegate the duty to local store managers) but it makes customers happy, it makes the supermarket look good, and—most importantly—it keeps small, local farmers in business.

I often wonder why this model hasn’t transplanted itself into our supermarkets, where, with a little re-jiggering, it easily could.

Posted by Nathalie Jordi on Jun 28, 2007 at 5:20 PM
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