Is soil over-hyped? Debunking myths with Ventisquero and Tim Atkin

By Jo Gilbert

Published: 25 November, 2024

‘Can you taste Chilean terroir?’ – or indeed any terroir? That was the question posed by Tim Atkin MW at a Ventisquero-led masterclass which put Chilean wines side by side with other entries from the Old and New Worlds.

The masterclass, co-hosted by Ventisquero’s chief winemaker Felipe Tosso, put attendees’ palates through their paces via a blind tasting of four flights. Each comprised three wines – and out of those three, two were from Ventisquero in Chile, while attendees were tasked with spotting the outlier which could hail from anywhere across the globe.

Another layer of complexity was added to proceedings with the introduction of soil type. Each flight held a predominant soil in question, either limestone, clay, alluvial or granite.

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“It’s a complex subject,” Atkin said, pointing to the historical precedent for the term ‘terroir’. He gave the example of Burgundian monks who established the first Grand Cru sites by essentially “marking where the soils first melted at the end of winter. In the past, the idea of terroir was much more political and romantic than scientific.”

Today, we have a much more scientific basis for the existence of terroir – and whether it can be tasted in the glass.

Interestingly, Alex Maltman, emeritus professor of Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University in Wales and author of Vineyards, Rocks, and Soils: The Wine Lover’s Guide to Geology, questioned the significance of soil in the terroir triumvirate alongside geology and climate.

He said at the event: “The impact of soil on the flavour of wine is over exaggerated. Too many people taste wine from nearby sites and say ‘it tastes so different – it must be the soil!’ But how? It’s now expected in books on terroir to mention the impact of the soil, but authors rarely mention how it works. [This is important, particularly as] the soil only has a distant indirect relation on the nutrients in the wine. The geology is very important in the vineyard for growing plants, but how exactly does that link to flavour?”

This challenge was put to the test during the blind tasting, where – as expected – identifying the soil type for each flight and the non-Chilean interloper wine turned out to vary in terms of success.

A showing of hands revealed the audience to be pretty on the money when it came to identifying the distinctive brightness and freshness from limestone on the first flight’s two white wines and one red (the rest of the flights focused solely on reds). The others proved harder to pin down. The firmer tannins of clay and granite for example threw some off the path. The same went for the weightiness and textural elements of flights three and four (clay and alluvial respectively), which had some muddling the two (including this writer, to fess up).

So, to return to the question, can you taste soil in a wine? Chile, for its part, has some of the oldest vineyards in the world, with the influence of 2,000+ volcanoes dotted across 2,600 miles of coastal, valley and mountainous topography between latitudes of 17° and 56°. Surely, the impact of this soil diversity must leave a residue?

As so often, the conclusion seems to be ‘maybe’. And this sits alongside other areas of inquiry, such as ‘is minerality a useful descriptor?’ and ‘do vines possess the right receptors to carry flavour compounds of chalk?’.

To this, Maltman says: “Which type of chalk? There are many different types.”

As ever, fashions change – and this is as true in the wine world as any other. From the winemaker, to the influence of oak to the current preoccupation with soil, almost all parts of the winemaking process have had their star-making moment. The rebuttal to this of course is that science is now diving into the specifics of terroir, and what we can taste, like never before. That journey is still ongoing, for example in the presence of chalk. As Maltman says, not all chalk is made equal, and we now know that vines have receptors to carry the flavour compounds which define some types of chalk in the glass – and leave out others.

In the meantime, we can agree with Maltman’s assessment that the word ‘terroir’ “encompasses all the relevant vineyard factors, especially those involved in local climate”. Whether the “importance of soil for wine seems to be over-exaggerated”, we'll leave that for further debate.

Flight 1 – Limestone

Tara Atacama Chardonnay 2021
Domaine Vrignaud Chablis 1er Cru ‘Fourchaume’ 2022 (France)
Tara Atacama Pinot Noir 2021

Flight 2 – Granite

Herú Pinot Noir 2022
Pangea 2018
Mullineux Single Terroir ‘Granite’ Swartland Syrah 2021 (South Africa)

Flight 3 – Clay

Vertice Carménère / Syrah 2021
Isole e Olena ‘Collezione Privata’ Cabernet Sauvignon 2020 IGT Toscana (Italy)
Obliqua Carménère 2020

Flight 4 – Alluival