Terroir is a funny concept because it’s something that wine makers and wine critics care much more about than the average wine consumer. Normally this kind of masturbation is frowned upon in business because the more you fiddle around with your own priorities and ignore your market, the quicker you are out of business; but wine is one of those special businesses where your top-dollar customers want very much to know everything and be sensitive to each nuance, so all the diddling can be justified if it brings Parker your way, and gaggles of chequebooks thereafter.

That is why wineries want there to be terroir. But is it a thing that exists? Certainly there seems to be something to the idea in France. That is, among people with the sophistication of palette necessary, there is a high test-retest percentage for terroir detection: a set of Bordeaux wines can be consistently distinguished from a set of Rhones with identical varietals blind, and moreover tasters have shown a consistent ability to place a wine by taste to one of the principal French regions. Quite impressive really. I don’t know if the same can be said for Italy, but let’s go ahead and stipulate that the Old World is full of legitimate terroirists.

The flipside is that there is pretty strong debate about whether there is any terroir influence to speak of in California, let alone several distinct terroirs. A lot of this centers around minerality, the fact that French wines have it, owing to their soil content, but also the way their grapes are grown to accentuate their soil, and the fact that California wines don’t. Sure, people can identify California wines: by their huge fruit, huge sugar, and general overall hugeness, but now we’re stretching terroir to include culture, marketing, and other more prosaic influences; as terroir becomes everything, it becomes nothing. Australia often gets thrown into the same boat here (though one imagines less often by Australians).

So what of Ontario? The good news is that we have the Canadian Shield - lots of minerality in our soil, limestone, shale, the works. And thanks to the always enterprising VQA, we now have our own regional sub-appelations. Does giving it a name make it so though? Does a Pelee Baco Noir taste different from a Niagara one? Or more appropriately, do 10 Pelee bacos have something characteristic that 10 Niagara bacos don’t? And if so, is that a good thing, does it increase anyone’s appreciation of the product? I don’t have an answer here, but I’m ready to be convinced either way.