Talking dirty

Here's a nice article on Terroir - or more exactly, on what's NOT terroir - from Harold McGee and Daniel Peterson from the New York Times last Sunday.

Some great quotes are inside, like this gem...

“Plants don’t really interact with rocks,” explains Mark Matthews, a plant physiologist at the University of California, Davis who studies vines. “They interact with the soil, which is a mixture of broken-down rock and organic matter. And plant roots are selective. They don’t absorb whatever’s there in the soil and send it to the fruit. If they did, fruits would taste like dirt."

Mainly it reinforces points that have been brought to the topic on this blog - that "minerality" is not due to a large presence of minerals in the wine, that there is not "translocation" of the minerals in the soils directly into the fruit, etc.

It's definitely worth a read...