Is terroir always a sign of wine quality?

It’s after 10pm when my colleague and I finally arrive at our Düsseldorf hotel. Tomorrow the pre-ProWein madness starts, when we face four relentless days of meetings, get-togethers and frantic running between far-flung halls. It’s also taken four hours of driving to get here and, let’s be clear, we need a drink. Time to head to the bar.

He orders a beer while I order a Chardonnay.

The beer tastes nice.

My Chardonnay tastes of nothing. It’s offensively blank. In place of varietal character, it has a vague and unpleasant greenness to it, with hints of water and oxidation. I grimace and complain that it’s probably not Chardonnay, but some anonymous bulk wine, falsely labelled. My colleague tastes it.

“Chardonnay from Venezia,” he announces.

What? How can he possibly say this? There are no stone characters, no apple, no lemon, no vanilla, no hints of anything that could be construed as Chardonnay character. So why is he so confident it’s Italian Chardonnay?

And why does he think it’s from the Veneto, a varied region that produces (among other things) both the great wines of Valpolicella and Soave and cheap-and-cheerful Pinot Grigio?

“I did years of supermarket tastings, and that’s what cheap Chardonnay from that area tastes like,” he explains.

Now I’m curious. Could this bland wine, that tastes like nothing to me, actually be full of terroir? A terroir that announces itself to those in the know?

Do you think I’m joking? I’m not. As a student, I drank buckets of cheap, woody Australian Chardonnay. The kind of wine that’s made with irrigated grapes that are picked and tortured in an oak-chip strewn factory. The kind of wine that epitomises “bland wine from anywhere”. Put a glass of the stuff in front of your average member of the wine trade (I’ve done this) and ask about its origins, and they will often say it could be from South Africa, or California, or anywhere, really.

Except it can’t. Chardonnay from Australia’s hot irrigated Riverland area doesn’t speak of terroir, so much as scream and shout it. It’s raucous and I can spot it anywhere. I’ve often wondered if people assume cheap and cheerful wine is terroir-less, simply because wine aficionados never drink the stuff, and therefore aren’t familiar enough with it to realise how distinctive it is.

Here’s a chance to test my theory. Why does my colleague pin this wine to a specific part of Italy?

He shrugs. Because that’s what it tastes like, he says. It’s bad Italian winemaking.

I push him further. What makes bad Italian winemaking distinct from bad German or French winemaking? What aromas and flavours (or lack thereof) are the giveaway?

“If it was German, it would be sweeter,” he says.

In medicine, this would be known as a diagnosis of exclusion. The Germans like more sugar in their supermarket wines, the Italians less, therefore this is probably Italian.

“Why can’t it be French?”

“They would add some oak,” he says.

What he’s offering is cultural knowledge of how people do things, rather than an insight into terroir. And to put the nail in the coffin of my theory, he adds that “German hotels typically buy cheap Italian wines for their lists.”

Maybe there really are bland wines from nowhere.

“Also the…” he hesitates, groping for the right word. He tries out “elegance” and discards it as too elevated a term for a wine so bad. But I know what he means.

“You mean it’s watery,” I say.

He nods. Yes, that’s what he meant. “And the grapes from there… typical Uta,” he says, using the German term for ‘prematurely aged’. “Also that kind of nothing aftertaste. That’s typical.”

Watery? Uta? Nothingness? Maybe that’s terroir right there.

OK, not good terroir. I’m not making that claim. But maybe if grapes are grown in a certain place, and mistreated a certain way, they end up with a specific taste. Which they wouldn’t have if grown and mistreated somewhere else.

Finally we pick up the menu and check where the wine has come from.

Chardonnay from Veneto.

We leave it there. He goes off to talk to the guys from the IT department, who have wisely chosen to order beer, and I head to my room, leaving the glass unfinished. The conversation has proved nothing.

But it hasn’t disproved my theory, either. Maybe even crappy wines speak of their place.

Felicity Carter