The Taste of Place

There is a Gresham’s Law in music; bad tunes drive out good. On Sunday you hear a competent choir render a subtle and melodious anthem by Herbert Howells. You are then obliged to join in a repetitive praise chorus of the sort whose words and tune suggest that the righteous are those who have enjoyed a double lobotomy. Guess which piece you are still humming come Wednesday.

Of all the world’s annoying tunes, even worse than the song that never ends (it goes on and on, my friend), the ditty that annoys this noisy oyster most is the one about this land being my land. It’s not just the uninventive tune and bumpy rhythm, it is also the grotesquely all-embracing claim made by the words. They are as vapid as the line of Schiller made famous by being belted out at every performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, Diesen Küss der ganzen Welt—This Kiss to the Whole World. How could anyone, even a tenor going all out and backed by the full faith and credit of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, possibly offer osculatory satisfaction to the entire population of the planet at a single instant? I ask you.

Love of land, like kissing, has to be specific. “Breathes there the man with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said/This is my own, my native land!” Not that it has to be one’s native land. Generations of northern Europeans have loved the Mediterranean; for every Browning that prefers British buttercups (“the little children’s dower”) to the gaudy melon-flower, there is a Goethe with an ache for the land where bloom the lemon trees (though not all anatomize their Sehnsucht with the same cloying attentiveness).

Love of specific places, like all love, can lead to anguish. Think of Derry’s walls. Or consider the pain (for all concerned) of Serbian attachment to Kosovo, scene of their tragic defeat by the Turks in 1389. You have only to see Behind Enemy Lines (or read a decent newspaper) to know about the horrors of Srbrenica; there are websites maintained by professional Byzantine scholars that catalog the devastation recently wrought upon medieval Serbian art and architecture.

Any human love can be distorted. But in a pure form, the essence of a place appreciated for itself, without emulation or rancor, is a thing of beauty. Wine folk have a word (French, naturally) for the unique quality of a particular place that alone can produce a specific complexity of flavor. It is terroir, the character of a particular piece of terrain, its soil and geology, its climate and micro-climates, the entire physical condition of the place.

Nowhere is terroir more celebrated than in Burgundy, that celebrated swath of eastern France, which produces some of the most expensive wines in the world. The geology here is Jurassic limestone (the Jurassic Era was not invented by Mr. Spielberg but is named after the nearby Jura Mountains), but there are fine gradations of soil chemistry and chalkiness, not only from north to south but also up and down the broad, vine-clad hillsides.

Generations of agricultural ingenuity, beginning with the monks of medieval Cluny and Citeaux, have married the Pinot Noir grape to this complex landscape. In more recent times the vineyards have belonged to a maze of small proprietors, a complexity reflected in the system by which their wines are named, each “grand cru” having its own characteristic terroir and taste. I shall never forget the concatenation of complexity and power issuing from a glass of Corton Les Marechauudes 1964.

Alas, such experiences, at least for the likes of you and me, are rare. If you have not heard of a grand cru Burgundy, you cannot afford it. But there is red Burgundy of a more generic character that can also give great pleasure, especially with cheese or meat. The good and the best are not enemies. It is quite possible to enjoy a Burgundy Passetoutgrains, like the excellent example from Robert Chevillon available locally for less than $15, without insisting that place does not matter and thereby declaring war on terroir.

Nor does it involve assenting to the old saw that “good wine needs no bush.” Burgundy Passe-toutgrains is made mostly of the Pinot Noir grape, though it is permitted to add some Gamay, the lighter-flavored grape characteristic of the Beaujolais region. Buy some, you’ll like it. Well-made wines, unlike cheap music (“extraordinary how potent cheap music is”) and bumptious politicians, do permit variety.