Edinburgh University’s Institute of Geography occupies a handsome Victorian building not far from the Castle. I visited it recently at the invitation of Professor Mike Summerfield, a renowned geomorphologist – and keen wine enthusiast.

Among many other activities, Mike teaches an undergraduate course on ‘The Geography of Wine’, and by way of relaxing his students before a flurry of exams and assessments, he asked me to come up and field some of their questions. We had a great afternoon together. Here‘s a flavour of what we discussed.

Harry Mustard: Do you think that the “tsunami of homogenized, branded wine” has opened up the world of wine to a greater audience, or has it ruined the historical culture linked with local wines?

Gillian Hawkins: In your opinion how has the consumerism of wine changed in the last ten years?

Wine drinking is rising worldwide. (Or at least it was until the recent economic crisis.) In the UK, wine consumption rose by 17.42 per cent between 2001 and 2005. In the USA, it went up by roughly 10% over the same period; China was up by 8.46% and India up by 11% -- though from a very small base in those two latter cases. More people are drinking wine. Assuming that they are moving away from other alcoholic drinks rather than simply drinking more alcohol, then I think that’s a good thing, since wine tends to be drunk with food, in moderation, with the attendant health benefits those circumstances imply.

The democratization of wine is also a great thing. I remember when I first began to buy and to enjoy wine in the year before I went to university, back in 1974. It was a forbidding process. The wine merchants I visited were unwelcoming. I always felt an imposter -- and I felt they knew it. It was a great relief to be able to buy wine in a supermarket.

Yet exactly what wines are being drunk nowadays? How are they produced? How are they marketed and sold? And how do consumers purchase them? All of these things have greatly changed too.

Let’s take a deep historical perspective, first of all. In medieval times, and particularly for the 300 years during which Aquitaine was ruled from England, an annual wine fleet which left Bordeaux every year for northern Europe. It was one of the most important of medieval trades. In 1306, for example -- the year, by the way, that Robert the Bruce became King of Scotland -- an amount of wine equivalent to one-sixth of the Bordeaux 2005 harvest was shipped north. That’s a forest of casks, lashed to hundreds of little ships. (This volume of trade is what, three centuries later, lends force to Doll Tearsheet’s remark about Falstaff of having “a whole merchant’s venture of Burdeaux stuff in him” -- Henry IV Pt II, Act 2, Scene iv, lines 63-64.)

Madiran landscapeImagine the excitement on the quays of Bristol, Copenhagen and Stockholm as the new vintage arrived. In London, for example, the casks would have been trundled off to inns in Fleet St and Ludgate Hill, quickly broached, and enthusiastically sampled (new wine was the best wine back then, since old wine was often vinegar). Everyone drinking it would have been acutely aware of its rootedness in an origin, of its journey, and of the provisional and contingent nature of its qualities.

Much the same was still true when I began drinking wine in 1974. It hadn’t arrived in casks, of course, but there was still a great deal of anxiety that a particular bottle would be bad or undrinkable -- and a great deal of joy when it wasn’t. Origin was the key to flavour, and wholly conditioned my thinking about every bottle I tried.

And now? My guess is that, for at least half the wine drunk in the UK, brand has replaced origin. The deal (three for the price of two; price reductions; buy one get one free) will be the chief means by which that wine is bought. And origin is perceived at best hazily, and is often entirely missing from the drinking experience.

This is a substantial change, from wine as agriculture (provisional and contingent, depending on the grace and favour of a season) to wine as industry (uniform, consistent, reliable). The qualitative speckling typical of agricultural products has now become the qualitative smoothness of industrial products. Much wine is now becoming rootless. This is significant, because an important part of historical identity of wine has been its intimate implication in a sense of place. That has been a key pleasure of wine, too. When you strip wine of its sense of place, it becomes just another alcoholic drink.

But ‘ruined’? No. We now have two wine cultures, existing side by side. The traditional culture of wine, where wine is the product of a particular place on earth and its aroma and flavour reflects that origin, is alive and well. That culture has now been joined by a new, industrial one. If I felt the industrial one would eclipse the agricultural one, I would be worried. I don’t.

Amanda Lund: Do you think that with the increasing use and prominence of ‘flying winemakers’ such as Michel Rolland, individuality between vineyards and the wine that they produce will eventually be homogenized?

Chris Dryden: Where do you see wine consumption trends in the next 20 years? Will we be drinking major brands of wine or will there be a resurgence in demand for wine from smaller producers?

I wouldn’t describe Michel Rolland as a flying winemaker. He’s a consultant, which is a very different role. When you speak to those who use him, they value him as a taster and blender, someone who encourages experiment and effort, and someone who gives wine producers the confidence to try things they wouldn‘t necessarily have tried for themselves. He might, for example, encourage them to pick later, to have cleaner cellars, to handle their fruit more gently, to sort their crop, to manage extraction more softly, to optimise oak integration, perhaps to try some lees contact for reds, to avoid fining and filtration if possible. All of these strategies are designed to bring out the best in high-quality raw materials. A ‘flying winemaker’, by contrast, is the wine world’s equivalent of an special forces combat fighter, sent in to remedy a negative situation by any means available. Enzymes, selected yeasts, acids, tannins, chips and staves will all be used in a highly interventionist way to create something drinkable and saleable from indifferent grapes. The two roles are very different.

Yannick Pelletier, a young grower in St ChinianIt’s hard to give Chris a confident answer to his question in part because of the present economic situation. We don’t know what’s ahead. All we know is that we’re in the middle of an earthquake. What will the landscape be like when it’s over?

Maybe our fragile little civilization will deteriorate to the point where wine (always a luxury) will become irrelevant. Assuming, though, that our current economic woes are merely flu rather than the bubonic plague, then I would say that the future for wine will be increasingly brand-dominated. Luxury brands (like Lafite in China) will begin to become as important as cheap brands.

Small growers -- the great unbranded -- should have a great future, too, though, because the kind of drinkers inspired by wine’s complexity will demand more from them. And there is now a much bigger base of those committed and engaged consumers, thanks to the trends we discussed earlier.

Jessica Gulhane: Do you believe terroir plays any role in shaping wine characteristics, and if so, how?

Thomas Astor: Will New World wines develop terroir, or is the concept exclusive to the Old World?

Jessica’s question is one of enormous scope, and answering it properly would take longer than sorting out the latest round of WTO negotiations. But let’s have a go.

You won’t be surprised to hear me say that, yes, I do believe terroir plays an important role in shaping wine characteristics. Indeed it seems to me that terroir is almost inescapable in wine. You can find differences between big Australian Chardonnay brands and big Californian Chardonnay brands which are not simply due to viticultural practices or winemaking but due rather the overall cast of place. But the trace of terroir within an individual wine varies enormously. The trace in a big-brand Chardonnay is faint, whereas if you compare a Corton-Charlemagne with a Meursault Perrières the trace is (or should be) hugely significant – providing much of the interest in the wine for those who wish to look beyond its purely sensual pleasure.

The flavour of most wines, to generalise wildly, is around one-third winemaking, one-third variety and one-third terroir. These three elements don’t function in the same way within the formula, though. Variety and terroir are the genes of a wine: its potential. Winemaking is the catalyst which either realises or obscures that potential.

Assuming the catalyst is effective (i.e. with good, sensitive winemaking), then it seems to me that terroir will always be the dominant third. I suspect if you planted Syrah and Grenache in the Médoc it would still end up tasting something like claret. You can’t make Cab-Merlot from Coonawarra or Hawkes Bay taste like Cab-Merlot from Napa, no matter how hard you try. But I don’t want to suggest that terroir is all that matters; it isn’t. Without the human catalyst, terroir is just a dream.

Schist in Faugeres

Now to the second part of Jessica‘s question: how does terroir shape the characteristics of a wine? The inputs which create aroma and flavour in wine are immensely complex, and there is still much we don’t know. What exactly is going on, for example, in the bacteria-rich rhizosphere around vine roots, given that high pH soils have higher levels of bacteria than low pH soils, or that low pH soils have higher levels of fungi than high pH soils, and given that most vine roots are not the Chardonnay or Syrah we spend all our time talking about but rather vines known more curtly as SO4 or 3309 Couderc? What is the effect of UV light on leaves and grapes? What is the difference between a warm summer night in Pomerol and a cold summer night in Argentina’s Vista Flores on a Merlot vine? Wherever you look, there are uncharted complexities.

La Tyre, one of Madiran's great vineyardsBut to simplify, we could say that the print of terroir on a wine can be attributed to four main factors: rock structure and chemistry, soil structure and chemistry, topography and climate – in ascending order of importance. Climate is the most important element of terroir, and how it affects wine flavour is relatively easy to discern. The main point of difference between most wine-growing regions is climate. Climate begins to mesh with the other elements when one is considering terroir within winegrowing regions, or when comparing two adjacent regions within a broadly similar climatic regime. The smaller the area of study, the more likely it is that rock and soil will become key factors. This is why rock and soil are often considered to be synonymous with terroir in Europe‘s old-established wine regions, whereas in widely separated Southern Hemisphere locations climate by far the most important factor.

So, yes, terroir is universal. Assessing its importance is only a question of study and practice. But terroir is wildly unjust. Great terroirs are very rare. The search is never-ending. And no great terroir will last forever, because the physical circumstances of climate, landscape, soil and rock are ever-changing.

A final, important point to make is that the more a winemaker intervenes to change the raw materials he or she has harvested, the less evident terroir will be. If you have a great terroir and wish that print of place to be reflected in your wine, then you have to allow the balance and style of flavour delivered by the vineyard to be limpidly apparent in the wine. A vigorously interventionist winemaking stance will obscure terroir. The winemaker is the catalyst -- but there are different ways of assuming that role.

Joseph Jensen: Do you believe that your position as a writer plays a role within wine marketing and that your opinion can influence sales of particular wines?

Tom Buckley: Do you think the influence Robert Parker has in the wine world is ‘limiting’ the production of quality wine?

The first point to make in answering these three questions is that there are at least three different sorts of wine-writer. The wine-writing tradition which inspired me when I began work was literate and educational: the writer explained the wine world’s complications, shared his or her enthusiasms, and helped readers see the biggest picture -- to empower them to make their own decisions and discoveries. Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson remain the finest living exponents of this tradition.

Robert Parker has always seen himself taking a different role. He describes himself as a wine critic rather than a wine writer: his inspiration is Naderist consumer assessment, delivered without fear or favour. He has become the key taster and assessor of world’s finest wines. This is not necessarily an empowering role: his readers could become clones or slaves, drinking nothing but points and never understanding anything at all about wine. But used sensibly, Parker’s work is also empowering. His books, in particular, are filled with valuable background information as well as assessments.

The third sort of wine writer are The Recommenders. I am wary of this approach. It requires little skill, is only moderately educational, and is often uninspiringly written. Since the recommended wines are often samples delivered to the recommender in question by large retailers, it can be ethically dubious. But newspaper recommendations obviously influence sales of particular wines on a temporary basis.

Wine is complicated, so I do think wine writers play a useful role, just as writers on scientific matters or economic matters do. Is that influence too great? Robert Parker is the only writer whose influence is astonishingly direct; in effect, he makes the market in fine Bordeaux, and is highly influential for the Rhône and for California, too. But overall I feel that his influence is positive: it’s a wonderful stimulus for investment and effort, and it doesn’t lead to stylistic homogeneity precisely because terroir is the key factor in the wine-flavour equation.

Kirsty Smith: Do you think the film Mondovino was an adequate portrayal of its supposed object of study – globalization?

No I don’t, since the real villains (the large wine multi-nationals) were all missing. The apparent villains were either good guys or hapless by-standers. The film was full of sloppy thinking, propaganda and unchallenged nonsense. But the fact that it attracted such attention is very interesting from a media studies perspective. Everything in the film has been said before, and said much more effectively, in articles and books. But because it was presented in a documentary film which achieved modest international distribution, it attracted huge attention … whereas saying the same thing in articles and books attracts no attention at all. In that sense, the medium was the message.

I’m also less pessimistic about globalisation than the film purported to be. The rise of brands does not mean the death of the skilled and ambitious small grower, though it may mean the death of the inept and lazy small grower. And whenever a wine-producing country begins to get beyond the sheer thrill of managing to export, it then begins to want to make wines which reflect terroir (often called ‘regionality‘).

For more thoughts on Mondovino, see the Q&A section of this site.

Alasdair Thomson: Over what time span, and to what extent, will Britain become a significant wine-producing region in the future?

Olivia Longson: With predicted climate change, Britain will become a prime location for vineyards. How difficult do you think it will be for British wines to overcome the current prejudices against them and will British wines ever become a real threat to more traditional producing countries?

At the moment, English wine-production is statistically insignificant: less than Luxembourg. I doubt we will ever approach the production figures of Cava or Champagne, let alone those of a major wine-producing country.

Lands costs in England are high; overheads and ancilliary costs are high; there is no base culture of wine production; our weather still falls far short of what’s needed for regular high-quality wine production. All we have proved in the last couple of decades is that we can make good sparkling wine by trying very hard -- but so can other regions and countries where you don’t have to try anything like as hard. For these reasons, I don’t think we will become a serious wine-exporting country in the foreseeable future. The market for these wines will remain predominantly domestic.

It seems inevitable to me that if we have enough global warming to make English vineyards genuinely competitive with Champagne within the next 20 years, which really means a rise in temperature of a couple of degrees centigrade, then the changes elsewhere in the world brought about by global warming on that scale and in such a short time-frame may be so dramatic and life-threatening to millions that making sparkling wine will be the last thing on our minds. Instead, we will be engaged in food wars and refugee crises of unimaginable proportions. If we get there in 100 years, by contrast, then perhaps we can maintain the current social order -- and thus the luxury of wine-making.

Attitudes to English wine? No problem. They’ll change; indeed they’ve already changed. But the narrow style band open to us means that no current exporter to the UK need fear the rise of UK wines. English and Welsh wine production will never occupy more than a small segment of the sparkling wine market in the UK.

Alec Robinson: With the apparent fragility of conditions that influence concepts of ‘terroir’ and ‘climat’, how will climate change influence the ability of wine makers to differentiate themselves through quality?

This is the most difficult question to answer, since it’s all guesswork.

As I’ve already said, the greatest terroirs are rare, and will always be rare. It’s possible that climate change will remove some of these without replacing them. (The 2003 vintage in France, for example, was unprecedentedly hot, perhaps the first hot vintage on record which seemed to deform rather than enhance the character of some of France’s greatest wines.) But it’s also possible that climate change means that we will end up with more fine wine regions than we started with, especially now that we are scouring the world rather than just relying on Europe.

The creation of quality wine, too, is much better understood today than it has been in the past. We can be flexible in the face of changing climates. (And remember that climates have always changed: European winemaking flourished during the Medieval Hot Period and suffered during the Maunder Minimum.) The present Golden Age of wine production puts us on a good footing for the challenges ahead.

But I should stress yet again that winemaking, and wine consumption, is a phenomenon of peace and plenty, democracy and free trade. In situations of crisis, war and social breakdown, making and selling great wines will be more difficult than it is today, and perhaps even totally irrelevant. Climate change is a major challenge, but so is the environmental destruction brought about by the human overload on the planet. It wouldn’t take much to break our food chain, and we may be far closer to that than we realise.

James McKenna: As so many agricultural products are following the trend of becoming organic, do you see wine producers following suite? And why has there been little pressure or interest from the public to change wine to an organic product?

Wine isn’t a raw ingredient like a carrot. It’s a processed product, like a sausage or a loaf of bread. We don’t yet have organic norms for the process; we only have norms for production. There is, therefore, no ’organic wine’; there is only ‘wine made from organically grown grapes’. That’s the first point.

The second is that ‘organic wines’ have often been disappointing in quality. For some pioneering organic wine producers, being organic has been the first priority and producing top-quality wine a secondary consideration. The organic ideal is only attractive if it is yoked to high quality.

Because of these disappointments, otherwise high-quality producers are wary of seeking organic status for their wines even if they fulfil all the criteria for organic production. Paradoxically, they fear they wines will be less well-viewed by discerning consumers, They don’t want to fetch up in the organic ghetto.

Nonetheless, seen or unseen, the drift to organic and biodynamic production will continue. Why? When combined with skilled winemaking in the right location, the results can be outstandingly good. And for truly great vineyards, there seems to be no better way of maximising quality than by adopting organic or biodynamic practices.