‘Le terroir, c’est la vie’: Re-animating a concept among Burgundy’s wine producers

Abstract

Organic and biodynamic methods of cultivation present particular challenges for the production of wine in a terroir-based system. This remains underexplored in academic work, yet it represents the confluence of two important contemporary trends in the wine industry. In this article, I draw upon interviews and participant observation with wine producers in the French region of Burgundy to examine emergent tensions between terroir and environmentally sustainable modes of production. Following an introduction to the subject, in the first section of the article I show how claims made about vineyard soils operated within the context of a simultaneously agronomic, environmental and cultural notion of terroir. In the second, I show how organic and biodynamic wine producers drew my attention to ecological dimensions of terroir by reference to things that could be appreciated aesthetically in the landscape. Reflecting on producers’ opinions, media coverage and wider scholarship, I make some initial steps in examining how environmentally sustainable modes of production are rhetorically and practically mobilised in the service of the widely shared notion of terroir, and, by extension, how these modes of production shape the sense of terroir that is promulgated in the cultural, economic and political organisation of wine.