My terroir

To be brutal, Nossiter clearly has never read either the Greeks or the Chinese. If any language is staccato and lyrical, that would be Classical Chinese (at least in poetry) since it is basically a monosyllabic and tonal language. Classical Greek, on the other hand, is polysyllabic, inflected, and draws on vocabulary from several different dialects (mostly Ionic and Doric, with some Aeolic thrown in). If you wanted mellifluous indecipherability, Pindar is a pretty good point of departure. I suggest you find a large tub of salt and apply to Nossiter's analysis of any topic you care to name.
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As for my terroir - a long, hot bath, followed by good hot coffee, a top-class novel, and a cat curled up beside me. Trahat sua quemque voluptas...

"I am lit from within" haha

You boss quits and this is what you do?

Terroir-ours includes much also, but I will try to stick to an original definition. We are 12 miles off Lake Erie. The water being warmer than the air this time of year causes the updraft of moisture that gives lake effect rain. Perfect timing for maturity. That is the obvious but it has contibuted to soil, geography, and growing season since the glaciers that formed the Great Lakes. There are so many excellent grape growers and winemakers. One example-the Klingshirn men(3 generations) in Avon Lake. They make a Chambourcin that during maceration can include stems and skins, and uses only wild yeasts. This can only be accomplished because of terroir. One story in hundreds.

Snazzy jammies there, Rod. Seriously, I hope they were pajamas!

I think that folks like Steinberger forget that writing about wine is supposed to be pompous gasbaggery. That's what's so great about it: just as you drink wine for the taste and the sensation, you drik in writing about wine not for enlightenment, but for the pure fun of clever words thrown together. The wine writer is a bullshit artist, and I mean that in the most honoring sense.

Amen! Amen! Amen! I was sipping that bold and spicey Syrah.

The aforementioned prose, easily adaptable to ones bathroom accomplishments, is wanting for a hint Paradise Gas and a smooth, clean, finish.

And now, my terroir:

Jefferson City, Missouri. A little town on a big river, streets and neighborhoods spreading out from the Great public buildings downtown. The big river keeps us honest -- we know it doesn't need us like we need it. It keeps us in our place.

The dome of the capitol is visible from everywhere, but that just makes it easier for us to keep an eye on it, make sure those legislators don't wander too far off. We know that governments are like two year olds: cute enough in their antics sometimes, but they'll get into trouble if you turn your back too long.

Smart German houses, and cozy Irish pubs. Always hire the Irishman to sing, play the fiddle, or tell stories, but hire the German to build your house and plow your field.

Bright light in the summer, in our house on the hill. Rooms full of boys grown into men, and full of jokes. Mom and dad both in the kitchen, cranking away on something great. Good beer in the fridge, good booze on the top of the cabinet. Cats underfoot. Cool air and blue skies, and tea and a pipe on the back proch.

You'll get over it, Rod.
The first thing small-town Southern boys get into when they think they'e ready for the big-time is this wine thing. I was into it 10 or 15 years ago too, sitting around in my back yard in rural North Carolina sipping a chardonnay and imagining I was well on my way past my small-town upbringing.
At a certain point, though, you realize that the fuss over wine is just a lot of bullshit and that you should never spend more than around $7 for a bottle, although I'll admit that inflation is making that number creep up a bit.

Hear hear, Mill boy! I pick up a bottle of Yellow Tail Chard for $7.99 every time I'm at Publix! Suits me just fine. And while I love all this talk of "terroir," I find wine writing kinda silly...

What's interesting, and kind of sad, about Mill Boy's remarks is he assumes that the only reason one would drink wine is for the sake of distancing oneself from one's small town upbringing. If that's why you drink wine -- if that's why you do anything -- you're a boob. I hate to disappoint you, Mill Boy, but I'm actually more secure than you seem to be. I've been drinking wine for over 20 years, and haven't lived in a small town in almost a quarter century (though why you should believe small-town wine drinkers to have uncultured tastes I have no idea). I drink for the taste of it, period. It has never occurred to me to sit in my backyard anywhere and take satisfaction that the food and/or drink I put in my mouth says anything about my self-worth. Don't project your own complexes onto other people.

I do envy you in one respect: if you can be consistently satisfied with $7 bottles of wine, you're a fortunate man. It's simply not true that there's no difference between a $7 bottle and a $26 bottle. While price certainly does not guarantee quality -- and most of us will have had expensive bottles of wine that don't taste as good as cheaper one -- it is ill-informed reverse snobbery to say that all wine tastes the same, so you might as well buy the cheapest one in the shop.

yeah, I'm guessing Mill Boy doesn't quite know this subject

Wine rapidly improves in quality between the $5 and $30 range....after $30 the law of diminishing returns really starts to kick in.

Yeah, I think Mill Boy simply never did like wine all that much. Nothing wrong with that, but it would be like me offering opinions about the NFL, and telling people who like the Dallas Cowboys that they're only doing that because they're insecure.

My dad really likes plain old mass-produced beer. I bring microbrews around from time to time, and he'll drink them, but nothing satisfies him like Budweiser, so that's what he drinks. I've got no problem with that, but I would have a problem if he were to argue that the only reason I drink microbrews is because I'm trying to impress somebody.

I'll say it again: if you drink or eat anything for any reason other than the pleasure of it, you're doing it wrong.

BTW, Mark, you're right about the stem(less)ware. We bought those a couple of years ago after losing too many conventional wine glasses to small children turning them over. But stemless wine glasses really aren't the way to go.

With Rod and against Mill Boy, I am willing to believe that a $30 bottle of wine tastes better than a $7 bottle. Indeed, I do believe it: I've had the opportunity to drink a few expensive wines and they were great. But I am a cheapskate, and therefore I have kept my taste in wine at a second grade level so that I don't spend more on wine than I care to. Usually this means that I buy wine by the box from "upscale" wine-box sellers. It works well, although my wife is sometimes embarrassed when I bring a box to a BYOB establishment. It could mean Bring Your Own Box, I tell her.

That's my terroir. So is drinking Straub beer (from the small town here in Western PA where my great-grandma was born) and Jameson whisky ('cause I'm Catholic and want to believe that Bushmills is Protestant whisky despite the evidence of any such thing). So is eating kielbasa and pierogies in the fall and in every other season. So is cultivating the peculiar mix of grumpiness and friendliness that can only be found here in Pittsburgh. Something to do with the cloudy skies, the industrial past, and the fact that lots of folks here have kin in Eastern Europe.

Sometimes I ask men who use stem-less wine glasses if they have trouble lifting them with their limp wrists. That's my terroir too.

Mr. Dreher, @ 10:54 PM, writes:

“My terroir is the hearth and the black iron pot. It's Randy Newman's melancholic piano, Bach's solo cello suites, Diana Krall's love ballads, old Van Morrison, Billie Holiday's blues, REM's "Nightswimming." It's pot roast and brussels sprouts with bacon, sausage and apples and Irish oatmeal. It's where hobbits live. It's autumn, and crisp air with a hint of wood smoke, and tulips in the springtime, and mustard greens and bourbon and the South, especially the way south Louisiana smells on a wet fall morning.”

My “natural habitat”, for lack of a better phrase, is my small house in Upstate NY. It’s the basement office where I keep the Wonder Box that lets me write MY pompous-windbag posts. It’s sausage-and-eggs with my boys on weekend mornings, and piling everyone into the car Saturday at 5 for Vigil Mass. It’s Styx and Dennis DeYoung (“There is no Rock God but Dennis DeYoung, and Tommy Shaw is his Prophet !”) on the laptop, and tales of Grantville and Honor Harrington in my hand (and in my briefcase; courtrooms can be VERY boring !). It’s my oldest daughter training for her first triathlon and my younger girl practicing her violin for Youth Orchestra. It’s pasta fagioule (with baguettes), trips to the Syracuse farmer’s markets and all the fried dough appertaining thereunto. It’s 4.5-mile runs past the church and back at insane hours of the night. And don’t forget constant trips to the library, with ice-cream sundaes on Friday nights.

Not to mention telling the Rules to small boys before bedtime.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

P.S. I attach no picture of myself to this for several reasons. Chief among which is a desire not to induce vomiting on expensive computer screens among those who read this, as well as not wanting to frighten dogs, small children or women of delicate constitution.

Rod;

These types of articles and posts is where your at your best, stick with this, stay away from the scandals that are so tempting to focus on when covering the news. You have a wonderful eye for what's true, good, and beautiful, but you also have a temptation to negativity, example, you believe every disaster theory out there- (economic, swine flu, etc.) God placed the desire for beauty in your heart, stick with it! Chesterton said, "the news only reports on the man that fell off the scaffold, and not on the thousand that worked in perfect safety"

"But ultimately, the defining characteristic of taste is the coherent relation of that preference to one's own conduct, to an ethical relation to oneself and to the world."

Yes!!

Over against Russell Kirk and his beloved gargoyles, I give you St. Martin in the Fields -- the pairing of portico and spire, of Athens and Jerusalem -- and I venture to claim that almost all of my taste, from claret to Federal furniture, through architecture and music, bears a relationship to classical Anglicanism. The gravel of my terroir is the Coverdale psalter.

Rod,
This post is why you are a professional writer. Excellent post.

Ethan C., your post caused a wave of...well, I can't call it homesickness, exactly. I spent about one year total in Jefferson City, Missouri when I was in the seventh grade. My family moved a lot when I was a child.

But Jefferson City! I've never lived anywhere where the trees grew with more leafy generosity, where the seasons were more brightly and charmingly delineated: spring, with its dazzling skies and torrents of melting snow on the sidewalks; summer, with its heat and its trips to that magical wonderland called Central Dairy, which had the absolute best peppermint ice cream I will taste this side of heaven; fall, with its crackly dry carpet underfoot and the sudden breathtaking rush of really cold air mixed in with the lazy sunshine of a dwindling afternoon; winter, coated in ice and snow, still, quiet, dormant and solemn.

It was in Jefferson City that I learned the meaning of two words, service and generosity. I learned about service when I was permitted to volunteer during the summer at St. Joseph's Home for the Aged, and discovered that it was possible for a girl in junior high to find common ground and even friendship with women in their nineties. And I learned about generosity when a community to which we were newcomers surrounded us with gifts and love when that Christmas coincided with a family financial strain--I still have and cherish the little brown teapot that was my favorite gift that year, and which meant so much more than I even knew at the time.

It may not be my terroir, but I envy, just a little, those of you for whom it is. Ethan, I have lived in ten states and more towns and cities than I can count, but if there was ever a place that felt like my idea of home, it was Jefferson City.

Brian @ 10:47 PM writes:

"I'm certainly headed toward a comfortable leather chair, my own book lined office (one day), good wine, good beer, good liquor, good food -at home and at restaurants with lots of kids running around laughing at their nerdy dad."

At least you're pointed in the proper direction, kiddo. Just make sure the wine is reasonably priced, the beer is Guinness, and most of the food is home-cooked. Then top it off with a proper selection of books in the library (Turtledove, Weber and Flint will do famously, for starters), and music in the CD player, you'll be all right.

Oh, and do make sure one of you is home with the kids for the first few years. You'll neither of you regret it; trust me on that point. I've arranged it so for the last 15 years.

Now get to it, trooper !

Your servant,

Lord Karth

Terroir-ours includes much also, but I will try to stick to an original definition. We are 12 miles off Lake Erie...

You know Pelee Island Winery? I've had some very interesting whites from there.

My terroir is SoCal beach. Warm days, cool nights, a touch of salt in the air and late at night the sound of surf in the distance. The closest vineyards are in Malibu, but there's more in Santa Barbara, Paso Robles/Templeton, and then it's up to the Santa Cruz mountains. Most of what we drink comes from those areas, with us being partial to Santa Cruz.

So what are we sipping tonight? A Pauillac. LOL! See what poseurs we can be!

BTW: Mill Boy and MargaretE are projecting from their very real experience. You're never going to find a significantly better wine than a Yellow Tail at a Publix. Why deny the facts? But if you shop at Hyundai or Fiat, don't expect to find a Ferrari, Rolls or BMW. And just as driving a Ferrari on a track will redefine what "sports car" and "fast" mean behind the wheel, drinking some high-end vintages will redefine the entire world of wine.

This is why I love your blog, Rod!

Sharon