Travail a l’anglaise. Working in the English style. The phrase carried a certain dignity, the kind that accumulates around anything done long enough to acquire a proper name. In eighteenth-century Bordeaux, it described a specific practice: before any decent shipment of claret crossed the Channel, a negociant would add three gallons of Alicante — a dense, dark Grenache from the Spanish coast south of Valencia — to every hogshead. Then a measure of Hermitage, that muscular northern Rhone Syrah, for depth. Then a splash of stum, unfermented grape juice from near Sauternes, to rebind the whole thing and restart a gentle secondary fermentation during the voyage. The result would arrive in London as Bordeaux.
Nobody, precisely, was lying. The practice had a name. Merchants from both sides knew what it involved. Invoices recorded the component wines. Irish traders in Bordeaux — stationed there for generations, acutely aware of what the British Isles required — described the process in their correspondence as addressing “the frequent deficiencies of even the best wines.” One French source, late in the century, noted matter-of-factly that formerly, all Bordeaux arriving in England was blended with Hermitage. The modifier “formerly” was wishful. It remained standard practice for decades after.
England had gotten here through politics. In 1703, the Methuen Treaty redirected English wine consumption from France toward Portugal, preferential tariff rates being the bluntest possible instrument of palate formation. English consumers, raised on Bordeaux claret — light, elegant, barely over twelve percent — were now drinking port and Madeira and sherry, wines heavy with fortification and residual sugar. Within a generation the palate had shifted. The wine that arrived in an English cellar after travail a l’anglaise was not quite Bordeaux. But it was what England had learned to expect from the word “claret,” which in practice meant: deep in color, robust, able to survive a sea voyage without going to vinegar, and carrying enough body to satisfy a drinker whose other reference points were fortified.
The mechanism is not as antique as it sounds. In 2025, a different government deployed tariffs against European wine and spirits — demonstrating, again, that what ends up in a glass has always been as much a matter of trade policy as of taste.
What they were actually drinking, in many cases, had no particular origin. It was a commercial calibration.
The calibration only got less honest as the century turned. In 1820, a German chemist named Friedrich Accum published A Treatise on Adulteration of Food, and Culinary Poisons — and among the substances he documented in London’s wine supply were lead acetate, used as a sweetener despite being known to cause madness and death; logwood, a Central American tree bark that produced a deep red-purple dye useful for wine that needed more color; plaster of Paris, added to clarify and acidify thin product; and elderberry juice, shipped from northern Europe in bulk specifically for this purpose. The book named specific London companies. It sold a thousand copies in its first month.
Within a year, Accum’s enemies had manufactured a lawsuit against him — the charge, specifically, was mutilating books in the library of the Royal Institution, tearing pages from volumes, possibly to use as illustrations. Whether he had done it is unclear; he denied it. The sentence, had it stuck, would have meant a fine and likely imprisonment. What it meant in practice was that the men with the most to lose from his book had enough social reach to make England uncomfortable for him. He returned to Berlin. The wine trade, having named no lawyers, had nonetheless won.
By 1833, the wine writer Cyrus Redding felt compelled to define what pure wine actually was — “the pure juice of the grape alone, after due fermentation” — because the concept had become genuinely unclear to English consumers. His phrase unchecked operations of wine doctors treated adulteration not as an aberration but as a class of professional activity, openly conducted.
The worst of it arrived with phylloxera. The root-eating aphid — imported accidentally from America — reached France’s Rhone vineyards in 1863, hit Beaujolais by 1874, and devastated Burgundy’s Cote d’Or from 1878 onward. French production collapsed. Negociants who had sold genuine Burgundy now had nothing to sell — and rather than admit shortage, they did what the market had always invited them to do. Wine from Algeria, from Chateauneuf-du-Pape, from Spain arrived in bulk, was blended in Beaune and Nuits-Saint-Georges, and left for England and America labeled as Pinot Noir from the Cote d’Or. In the late 1880s, France was importing over a billion liters of foreign wine annually. Most of it disappeared into bottles with prestigious French names on the label. Some documented samples of “Burgundy” from this period contained no Pinot Noir whatsoever. Analysis found Algerian red, blackcurrant juice, sodium metabisulfite, and — in documented cases — beef blood, used for color.
In Hamburg, meanwhile, Norwegian blueberries arrived by the shipload. They had no purpose in a port city except wine.
This is the context in which terroir became a radical idea.
Not immediately, and not cleanly. The concept had been observed for centuries — Benedictine and Cistercian monks in Burgundy, managing vineyards with agricultural precision, had noticed by the medieval period that the same grape variety grown on adjacent plots produced wines of distinctly different character. They marked off the superior sections with stone walls. They were making maps of quality using nothing but attention and time. But this was local knowledge, not ideology. It was farmers noticing something that was true.
The monks were not wrong. There are better and worse places to grow grapes — the drainage of a particular slope, the way morning fog lifts over a valley, the microclimate produced by a stand of trees two fields over. These are real variables, and they matter. What the monks also understood, though history has been less careful about preserving this half of the lesson, is that the place only reveals itself through attention. Season after season, generation after generation, they learned not just that the plots were different — but what each one required. The terroir was the condition. The craft was the response.
The ideological weight arrived in the 1930s, mostly through the work of a Burgundian historian named Gaston Roupnel. His argument was not primarily about chemistry. It was about culture: that terroir was not merely geographical but historical — an accumulated relationship between people and land over centuries, expressed in the wine as surely as it was expressed in the dialect, the architecture, the particular character of the local cheese. A wine with terroir was a wine that could not be faked. It carried an origin so specific, so entangled with the people who had grown it, that no Hamburg blending operation could replicate it.
The argument arrived at exactly the moment it could be institutionalized. In 1935, the French government created the AOC system — appellation laws that would, in theory, make travail a l’anglaise impossible by statute. Wines would be what they claimed to be. The Burgundy in the bottle would contain Burgundy.
The AOC was solving several problems at once. It was a fraud-prevention mechanism. It was an economic protection for genuine producers who had been undercut for decades by fraudsters selling fake wine at lower prices. And it was, less heroically, a competitive shield: the appellation boundaries were drawn partly to exclude regions that had historically supplied blending wine — including Algeria, then a French colony full of French settlers farming French-funded vineyards — which was systematically locked out of the new classifications, destroying its wine industry as a side effect.
The Languedoc had already drawn blood over this question. In 1907, the region’s winegrowers — undercut by cheap Algerian imports flooding the market, and by domestic fraudsters selling sugar-and-raisin water under French appellation names — organized. A small-scale farmer, cafe owner, and amateur theatre director named Marcellin Albert led the movement from a village in the Minervois. By June, somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 people had gathered at Montpellier — the largest demonstration in the history of the Third Republic. One in every two inhabitants of the Languedoc. Georges Clemenceau — Prime Minister, later to lead France through the First World War, a man not historically associated with flexibility — sent in twenty-two regiments of infantry and twelve of cavalry. There were deaths. Eventually Albert came to Paris to negotiate. The meeting became famous because Clemenceau lent him a hundred francs for the train home and then told the press about it. Albert returned to his village as a man who had accepted money from the enemy. His reputation was finished.
What they had been protesting was the right to have their wine called wine. The right to a name that couldn’t be stolen, diluted, or faked in Hamburg.
The idea was correct. The place should mean something. That was, in 1907 and 1935, a genuinely radical position.
The problem with a radical position is what happens after it wins.
Terroir spent about fifty years as a genuine intellectual proposition — the idea that place matters, that adjacent vineyards can produce wines as different as two different people, that quality is inseparable from origin. The classification of Burgundy’s Premiers Crus and Grands Crus was an attempt to map this in stone. The wines from classified plots were genuinely different, and the difference was reproducible across decades.
And then came the marketing.
By the 1990s and 2000s, “terroir” had migrated to every wine region in the world. Oregon had terroir. Marlborough had terroir. Napa had terroir. New World regions that had existed as vineyards for forty years were suddenly discovering their relationship with centuries of accumulated place. Every restaurant menu offered local terroir. The word expanded until it meant, in practice: we want you to feel that this product is connected to something authentic that no one else can claim.
During this same period, the Robert Parker era was reshaping what winemakers made. Parker — the American critic whose 100-point scale dominated global wine judgment from the 1980s onward — rewarded wines that were rich, extracted, high in alcohol, generous with new French oak. Michel Rolland was the consultant who knew how to score well: the same method applied across more than a hundred and fifty wineries on four continents. Rich fruit, plush tannins, micro-oxygenation to soften tannin structure regardless of origin. The documentary Mondovino caught him advising clients in Argentina, South Africa, Italy, and Bordeaux to do essentially the same thing. The wines scored well. They tasted of a house style more than of a place.
If terroir were the determining variable, this should have been impossible. One consultant should not have been able to override the expression of place across hemispheres. But he did, reliably, for decades. The wines spoke the same language regardless of where the grapes had grown. Nobody could quite explain this while simultaneously maintaining that terroir was everything.
In Burgundy, there is a fifty-hectare vineyard called Clos de Vougeot.
It is a Grand Cru. It sits in the Cote de Nuits, one of the most revered stretches of wine-growing land in the world. Its soil has been analyzed, mapped, and debated for centuries. The monks who built its original stone walls in the twelfth century believed it to be among the most special pieces of ground in France. The classification of 1936 enshrined that belief in law.
Clos de Vougeot is divided into more than one hundred parcels, owned by more than eighty producers. All of them can put “Clos de Vougeot Grand Cru” on their label. All of them are working the same classified terroir.
A WSET instructor who organized a comparative tasting of wines from across the vineyard’s producers noted afterward that he “wouldn’t pay ten euros” for some of them, while others might “be among the best wines in the world.” The quality spread was extreme. The terroir was constant.
The producer was the only variable that moved.
This is terroir’s most visible contradiction: if the place were the primary variable, Clos de Vougeot should produce eighty versions of a recognizably similar wine. It does not. It produces wines that have almost nothing in common except the Grand Cru designation on the label. The classification tells you about the land. It tells you almost nothing about what’s in the bottle. For that, you need to know who made it.
In May 1976, a British wine merchant named Steven Spurrier organized a blind tasting in Paris. French experts scored a selection of Napa Valley wines against the finest bottles of Bordeaux and Burgundy — wines that presumably carried the accumulated weight of centuries of terroir knowledge. California had no classified vineyard system, no tradition of passing wisdom from one generation to the next about what a specific slope required. Its wine culture was, by Old World standards, extremely young.
A Chateau Montelena Chardonnay won the white wine category. A Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon won the reds.
The winemaker behind the Chardonnay was Mike Grgich, who had been born in Yugoslavia, trained in Germany and Burgundy, and had no ancestral relationship with the Napa land whatsoever. He was, by every logic of terroir as destiny, disadvantaged. He brought exceptional technique and an unusually calibrated palate to available fruit in a well-suited climate. The result beat the most prestigious terroir claims in the world.
Several years earlier, an Australian winemaker named Max Schubert had begun developing what would become Penfolds Grange after visiting Bordeaux in 1950 with a single ambition: to make a wine capable of decades of aging. Grange is made from grapes harvested across multiple vineyards over a wide geographical area. The specific blend changes year to year. What is constant is the winemaker’s approach: partial barrel fermentation, eighteen to twenty months in American oak, rigorous selection across all available fruit. There is no terroir claim behind Grange because the wine was designed to have none. It is one of Australia’s most celebrated bottles, routinely listed among the world’s greatest. Its consistency is not a property of the land. It is a property of the approach.
The terroir argument tends to go quiet around Grange.
Randall Grahm, a California winemaker who has spent thirty years in obsessive pursuit of wines that express place, once said: terroir cannot exist without the perception and participation of a human being.
It is a careful sentence. He is not saying terroir is fake. He is saying it is incomplete — that without interpretation, without a human standing between the land and the glass and making decisions, the land cannot speak. The terroir sets the conditions. The winemaker decides what happens within them. Without someone running the projector, there is no image — however good the film.
The natural wine movement, which emerged as the dialectical response to the Parker-and-Rolland era, made the mistake of treating non-intervention as a philosophical virtue in itself. If Rolland’s technique could override terroir, then removing technique would restore it. Wine would express the place without interference.
What happened was more complicated. Wine made by people without sufficient knowledge of vine and cellar did not express the place. It expressed the microbiological accident of unguided fermentation — which turns out, across all climates and regions, to produce a surprisingly consistent family of funky, oxidative flavors that have almost nothing to do with geography. In their enthusiasm for what wine could become without interference, the movement’s most zealous fringe produced wines that tasted less of where they came from than the Rolland wines they had set out to oppose. They had swapped one kind of homogenization for another. Rolland used technique to make everything taste the same; they used the absence of it to achieve much the same result. The terroir of unguided fermentation, it turns out, is everywhere identical.
Pierre Overnoy, one of the genuine pioneers of natural winemaking in the Jura, understood the difference: making natural wine is not so easy — you don’t just decide not to add sulfur and go on vacation. His wines are extraordinary because of what he does, not what he refrains from doing.
The Barolo Wars made this argument visible in a way that’s useful.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Piedmont’s great winemaking families split along philosophical lines. The traditionalists — long maceration, decades in large old oak botti, wines that required twenty years in a cellar before they were ready — argued that this was what Nebbiolo from the Langhe hills required. The modernists — shorter maceration, small new French oak, wines approachable on release — argued that tradition had confused what Nebbiolo could become with what it had to become.
Both groups were working the same grape on the same hills. The wines tasted dramatically different. When Aldo Conterno broke from his brother Giovanni in 1969, what diverged was not the land. The hills were identical. What diverged was the philosophy of the person in the cellar.
By the 2000s, the argument had mostly resolved. Traditionalists adopted improved sorting and temperature control. Modernists dialed back new oak. What emerged was a Barolo that could do both things: express the Langhe with precision and also be approachable in a reasonable lifetime. The synthesis was achieved not through better terroir but through better craft — by winemakers willing to revise long-held positions in light of accumulated evidence.
This is what Emile Peynaud had demonstrated in Bordeaux, earlier and at larger scale. Before his consulting work from the 1950s onward, the great chateaux were harvesting too early and maintaining unhygienic cellars. He changed the practices. He convinced forty-five crus classes to change how they worked. Bordeaux now harvests eight to ten days later than before the Second World War. The wines are categorically different. The land is identical. What changed was the human.
There is a pattern across all of this that has nothing specifically to do with wine.
It is the pattern of material and mastery, and the error of privileging one at the expense of the other.
The travail a l’anglaise merchants made one error: they treated the material as infinitely manipulable, raw substance to be shaped to market requirements with no regard for what it actually was. The result was a race toward the generic — wine that meant nothing because it could mean anything, that carried no record of where it had been or what had happened to it.
The terroir fundamentalists made the opposite error: they treated the material as so complete, so expressive, so laden with meaning that the human hand could only detract from it. The result was wines that expressed the ideology of their makers more clearly than they expressed the vineyards they’d come from.
The best winemakers working now understand that they are neither servants nor masters of the material. The terroir sets the conditions. The winemaker decides what happens within them — about when to pick, how long to macerate, what to keep, what to let go. These decisions are not secondary to the wine. They are the wine.
What the Germans shipped through Hamburg, and what the English merchants added to the hogshead, and what the Languedoc fraudsters sold as Burgundy — all of it was an attempt to replace the particular with the generic, to substitute a manufactured idea of quality for the thing itself.
The AOC system was built to stop this. It codified what the monks had noticed: that a specific place, tended with care over time, produces something that cannot be replicated elsewhere. This was true in 1935. It remains true.
But terroir escaped the concept, as words do when they become too useful. And what Rolland proved, blending across hemispheres, and what Clos de Vougeot demonstrates year after year with eighty different wines from the same classified ground — is that a name on a label is not a guarantee. The place is a prerequisite. It sets the ceiling. It determines what’s possible.
The ceiling is not the wine.
The wine you’re drinking is made by someone. That someone made choices. The interesting question — the one the terroir debate spent decades obscuring — is whether those choices were good ones. Not where the grape came from. What the person did with it.
There is a third variable — conveniently mine — which has nothing to do with the land or the cellar: where the wine is drunk, and in whose company. But that is a different evening.