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A barley grain, by contrast, is juiceless. Seasonal phenomena and micro-locational differences are inscribed like watermarks in the constitution of the juice. When they’re gone, they’re gone: quantities are limited. The fruit contains sugar-rich juice, which will simply be pressed and fermented, often with wild yeasts (grape seeds are discarded) the Chablis drinker drinks fermented juice.Ĭhablis grapes, moreover, are grown in Chablis.
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Next: a barley grain and a grape are profoundly dissimilar. Why should we doubt them? Distilling, after all, is a process of water exclusion. All that promotional footage of tumbling, peat-stained loch water is irresistible and makes a strong emotional appeal on the viewer, but no whisky scientist thinks that water counts for more than one or two per cent of the final sensorial profile of a dram. Let’s briskly explore the specificities of whisky and wine in turn. Much better for the malt-whisky community to concentrate on a different definition of terroir: ‘work before place’. Now, though, I think it is better to sink the Chablis definition (though this does indeed have some validity for Chablis) of ‘place before work’. I finished the book by leaving the question open. Naturally, I wanted Islay’s whiskies to reflect the place the book is, in part, a kind of terroir test, as I examined just what matters and what doesn’t matter in the creation of malt whisky aroma and flavour. I wrote the book because I had fallen in love with the place. That period culminated in two years of intense activity on Islay as I prepared the book which appeared in 2004 as Peat Smoke and Spirit (now rechristened Whisky Island). I write this with some sadness, since I spent a lot of time between 19 trying to make malt whisky fit the wine world’s very physical definition of terroir. Is this your favoured definition? Then malt whisky fails to qualify. Chablis tastes as it does not because it is made from Chardonnay or cool-fermented in steel on fine lees with malolactic, but because it grows on slopes of Kimmeridgian limestone at 47.815°N in a semi-continental location in the Seine basin, and may have been fermented with indigenous yeasts.
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When wine producers, wine writers and sommeliers use the term, they mean that the aromas and flavours of a wine are principally derived from its physical milieu rather than its grape variety or winemaking techniques. This is not, though, what the wine community means by terroir. Happy with this definition? Then it can indeed be applied to the creation of malt whisky. If the concept is valid, they say, then it holds that the ‘distinctive characteristics’ of a product are based on human activities in a place, combined with the knowledge that develops about those activities and that place. The experts don’t say that terroir exists they don’t say that it derives from the physical and biological milieu. ‘istinctive characteristics’ for products coming from a particular place (ie aroma and flavour), it says, are provided by an area in which ‘collective knowledge…develops’ concerning the interactions between a physical and biological growing milieu and winegrowing and winemaking practices. Their definition of ‘vitivinicultural terroir’ so reeks of committee chloroform that I won’t quote it in full, though you’ll easily find it online. How shall we define terroir? In June 2010, the grandees of the International Organisation of Vine and Wine met in Tbilisi, Georgia, to attempt to pin the celebrated butterfly.