#terroir

[petitedeath]

I started this drawing and it was fine in just ink. And the it was fine when I water colored it but then I accidentally ruined it. And just kept going. Oh well. I combined it with some experiments I did with paint pouring and peeling.

I finished reading authority last week and just loved the concept of the mouse/plant in the drawer and the concept of terroir. I'll have to try drawing it again.

[cool6876d]

[fanfanlemoko]

« L’homme “en soi” des Lumières n’existe pas. Il n’y a que des hommes concrets, fils d’une hérédité, d’une terre, d’une époque, d’une culture, d’une histoire, d’une tradition qui forment la trame de leur destin. »

— Dominique Venner, Histoire et Tradition des Européens : 30 000 ans d’identité, 2004.

[friday-tea]

Are you guys (gender neutral) looking into souring teas from countries other than China that may have lower tariffs like Kenya, Vietnam, Indonesia, or that one singular tea farm in Colombia? I’m pretty new to tea so I haven’t had the chance to try out teas from these countries, but I am very curious about them and will be on the lookout for some

We dudes (gender inclusive) are indeed already connected with a broad network of fantastic indie farms up to our quality and ethics standards all over the globe. There are some styles of Chinese tea that are truly irreplaceable, but I'm working on a "Chinese Tea Swaps" blog post to offer more guidance for folks and we are rebalancing the base leaf in a lot of our blends to keep them affordable and accessible while maintaining the gorgeous balance of assorted leaf profile notes folks have come to love from us. For now, to sate your curious thirst, search our site for any country you can think of, and if we have teas from that region they'll come up*! *Unless I missed tagging any and then they'll be sneaky, but we're usually super good about this

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Visitors to Burgundy … will sense all around them the history and religion. … They will know that this is hallowed soil: it has been blessed and cajoled and prayed for over the centuries, many of the vineyards being worked by monks for whom wine is not just a drink but a sacrament … Even in this skeptical age, their vine is something more spiritual than vegetal, and their soil more heaven than earth.

- Sir Roger Scruton, I drink therefore I am

Good wine is a ‘somewhere’, not an ‘anywhere’. It is stamped with a place and a year. Rooted, literally. The fancy French word for this is terroir, referring to the way in which environment - soil, geology, even the history of a place - is all responsible for a wine’s character. Terroir is a sense of place in a glass. Roger Scruton often referred to himself as a ‘terroiriste’. And this could describe his political philosophy as much as his philosophy of wine. From 2001 to 2009, Scruton wrote a wine column in the New Statesman, enabling him to smuggle into that otherwise exclusively Left-wing journal, all sorts of reactionary political ideas: about God, about fox-hunting, about beauty, about his love of the countryside.

Wine, for Scruton, was never just about the taste, never a merely aesthetic sensation. Indeed, he was extremely sniffy about all those ‘blind tastings’ — the ones where we delight when an expert fails to spot the difference between plonk and Premiere Cru. They miss the point, says Scruton. Blind tasting, he explained, is like blind kissing — not a good way to distinguish, for example, between someone who is sexy and someone who is not. Indeed, if the experiment on Love Island is anything to go by, it’s not even a good way to distinguish who your own girlfriend is.

That’s because sexual chemistry, like wine, is a great deal more than some momentary sensation on the lips. It’s a great deal more than a message sent by taste receptors to the brain. It is all about the terroir. And this is not just a comment about wine but about aesthetic experience in general. When we encounter a work of art, we bring a whole hinterland of knowledge that makes sense of that specific experience and gives it its character as art. Music is more than a vibration of the air and its reception by the ear and the brain. So too with wine and taste.

But scientists often get very sniffy about terroir. They think it’s some quasi-spiritual rubbish that has been invented by snotty French vineyards to give them a commercial edge. Writing in Decanter magazine, the geologist Professor Alex Maltman challenged the very idea that geology has any particular contribution to a wine’s taste. “Vines and wine,” he wrote, “are not made from matter drawn from the ground, but almost wholly of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, abstracted from water and the air.”

Scruton wrote about wine very differently - not because he disagreed about the science but because he understood aesthetics very differently. He bemoaned the way in which aesthetic experience had come to be seen as something separable and distinct from questions of the good, or the true, or of politics or indeed anything else. That’s why his wine column ranged so far and wide. Beauty, for example, an idea that lies at the centre of Scruton’s philosophy, is as much a moral as it is an aesthetic phenomenon. There is no wall between them.

His writing about wine could be a bit sentimental maybe. But what is going on in his love affair with Burgundy is as much about Scruton’s politics of place, his conservatism. At the centre of his political thought, was the idea of loyalty to place and to those with whom you share space as being of supreme value. This contains a sense of solidarity with the land – hence his thoroughgoing environmentalism — but also to the history of a place and its spirituality. And here we bump into what is most potentially dangerous about Scruton’s thought. Soil and sacrificial blood are, after all, ideas beloved by fascists.

But it is important to emphasise that he never thought the nation state should be celebrated in terms of race or creed. For him, it was a commitment to place, and the shared and common institutions, customs and traditions that make a place what it is.

Moreover,  Scruton’s conservatism wasn’t aggressive. Wine, when drunk properly, relaxes people and introduces conviviality. People fight over oil, he once remarked, but not over wine. As he once put it about wine-growing in the Lebanon, “Invade the producer and you lose the product; trade with him peacefully and you are supplied from year to year.” Indeed, “Hezbollah don’t occupy the Beqaa because of Chateau Musar – if they did, peace would quickly come to southern Lebanon.”

Wine, and indeed terroir-ism, was, for him, the product of, and encouragement towards, peace and civility. What he had in mind here was more the wine of the Greek symposium than that guzzled in quantity by the boorish drunk. His idea of heaven was that of domestic home-loving contentment, with friends sitting around the table drinking wine, sharing ideas. There is nothing remotely fascist about this.

[francepittoresque]

GASTRONOMIE | Moutarde de Charroux, fierté de ce village de l'Allier ➽ https://bit.ly/Moutarde-Charroux À Charroux, dans l'Allier, on fabrique une moutarde d'exception. Elle fait la renommée du village classé parmi les « plus beaux villages de France ». Son goût particulier lui permet de se différencier de la moutarde de Dijon

[celebratingwomen]

Stephanie Beatriz photographed by Noah Asanias for Terroir Magazine, May 2018

[psychophore]

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