Understanding Vineyard Soils, 2nd ed. - 2015

There is no branch of agriculture in which soils are more rhapsodized and venerated
than in viticulture. It is easy to understand why this is so, just as it is easy
to understand why our ancestors worshipped the sun and the moon, feared an
eclipse, and ascribed meaning to thunder.
The aromas and flavors of wine are astonishingly diverse and at best are compellingly
beautiful. Few processed agricultural products command a higher price
than the world’s finest wines. Since viticulture and winemaking alone are unable
to replicate the quality of benchmark fine wines in secondary locations, it is evident
that something in the environment in which the wine came into being governs
its fundamental quality. What might that be?
The preferred candidate for most wine drinkers is the soil. It can be seen,
touched, measured, dug, even smelled. Vines roots penetrate deeply into often
poor, rocky soils. A vine rootstock spends its entire life (sometimes a century or
more) in one place. In certain key European wine regions such as Burgundy, one
winegrower making his wine in a uniform manner from the same grape variety
will produce a very different wine from two vineyards 10 meters or less apart. It is
hard, confronted with sensory evidence of this sort, and lifted by the emotion that
great wine provokes, not to set about constructing a mythology of soil.
Enter Professor Robert White, soil scientist. In Understanding Vineyard Soils,
he describes what soil is and how vineyard soils differ from one another. (Soils
are not rocks and are much more than an accumulation of minerals.) We learn
about the life forms in the soils and about its air spaces, structure, and profile.
The presence of water in the soil is of huge significance for vines: is it best to
rely on what nature delivers, or is irrigation a wiser strategy? To what extent are
vines nourished by the soil medium in which their roots are buried, and to what
extent do they draw sustenance from light and air? What task do roots perform,
and how do they do it? How does insect life in the soil favor and challenge viticulture?
What, exactly, is a “healthy soil” for vines, and how might a winegrower
set about creating one? What do organic and biodynamic approaches to vineyard
husbandry bring, or neglect? How will climate change affect the world’s vineyard
soils?
This book will be of great practical value to anyone growing vines or looking
after a vineyard, but it is also essential reading for those wine lovers who are
prepared to demythologize their thinking about the soils in which vines grow. The
soil doesn’t explain the flavor of a wine, any more than thunder portends the wrath
of the gods. A vine is a plant, not a person; it does not feed but photosynthesizes.
A soil’s structural properties, its biota and the water relations it offers to the plant,
might be far more important than its precise mineral spectrum. Professor White
tells us what can be known at present about vineyard soils (hence the importance
of this revised edition), rather than what can be fabulated.
Aroma and flavor in wine are the product of a series of hugely complex equations.
Soil is of great significance; so too are landforms, climate, weather, plant
genetics, biochemistry, organic chemistry, and human cultural practices. This
book will help you lay the groundwork for a deeper understanding of the complex
issues that underlie a pleasure both simple and profound: drinking wine.
Andrew Jefford, journalist and author
Prades le Lez, France