Thoughts on Words and Wine

Leon: Friends, most of this article is from Ed and about wine.  I don’t know much about where wine comes from and how it is made. Since moving into the good life at the St. James retirement home I have developed a routine of having a bit of wine with friends every afternoon before dinner.

So, all I know about wine is that it comes from Walmart, and there are two varieties: Riesling and Chardonnay.  Until Ed wrote this I had never heard of the term terroir.

Now Ed will explain it—sort of.

Ed: The French word terroir refers to a concept that holds that factors such as climate, geology, history, and topography influence wine quality.  I don’t remember having seen the word used until less than perhaps a year or so ago, but it is apparently related to the current interest in organically grown food, just as some French terms are “in” with TV chefs—things like “mise en place” or “sous vide.”

An article by Rebecca Coffey in Discover magazine’s September 2011 issue, entitled, “Wine Whisperers,” tells of a recent trip to the Napa valley in which she visited several wine makers, representing extremes in the ideology of what she has termed “terroirists.”  Some maintain that rainfall, irrigation, degree and direction of slope, the mineral and biological content of the soil, the history of the vineyard, the native yeasts and molds, and even the number and kind of earthworms impart character to wines.

Toward the other end of the terroirist ideology are vintners who use commercial wine yeasts and sulfur dioxide, where needed, to maintain some control over the various organisms in the fermenting wine, as well as some added nutrients if analyses of the wine indicate its need. I don’t have any idea how the concept of terroir applies to our environment, but the article awakened some memories of attempts at wine making over the years—mine and other people’s.

Fermentation to produce alcoholic beverages is not limited to grapes, and where grapes do not prosper, other things are used to make beers and vodka-like drinks. When I started my European tour in Normandy in June of 1944, I encountered the first apple orchards I had ever seen, but found upon trying them that the apples were sour. Later I learned that they were cider apples, the basis of the potent apple brandy called Calvados. I saw my first bottle of Calvados in a barn, where a German soldier decided to leave his lunch that I had interrupted rather than shoot me on sight, for which I was grateful. The tall bottle contained a liquid that was obviously alcoholic, but remembering the lectures we had heard about booby traps and poisoned drinks, my buddy and I decided to try it out on our sergeant, who would drink anything.  He took a mouthful and declared, “This stuff is not worth a --------.  Gimme the bottle.”

Later I found myself in apple country again—as a graduate student. My major study at Cornell was in pomology—the history and science of fruit growing, and my office was close to the storage rooms and laboratory, so that the area always smelled somewhat alcoholic.  When the first heavy frost would start the grapes falling in the orchard plantings, several of us graduate students would go out and shake off enough to fill several five-gallon glass jars with crushed grapes, inoculated with a “special yeast” that a friend employed by a biological lab had smuggled out to us—a yeast reputed to be able to produce fourteen percent alcohol, if enough sugar was available.  We set these jars carefully behind a large storage cabinet, but one night the janitor hit one with his push broom and the fermenting slush ran all over the office floor.  Anywhere else that could have started something, but in the pomology department nobody noticed.

When apples started to ripen, a portion of the crop always went into apple juice, or sweet cider, very popular as a soft drink.  When the fall students came in droves, the Pomology Club set up machines to sell cider in various spots on campus.  I taught several classes that called for taking students to the orchard only about a mile or so away from campus, and I was able to get a large oak barrel that I filled with apple juice and inoculated with our special yeast.  Later, when it had snowed and got cold, we went to the orchard to prune trees, and I offered all the students the chance to drink as much as they could imbibe from the barrel through a tube on one breath. The student who was clearly the winner later became the Dean of the College of Agriculture.

During my stay as a graduate student, the Chemistry Department replaced all of its “soft glass” with Pyrex—a fairly new product, and made nearby at Corning, New York.  They offered the often-unused soft glass to other departments, and we went over to see what we could use.  As a result, we were able to set up a fine all-glass still in a preparation room, and when our cider got alcoholic enough, we distilled some apple brandy, or “applejack.”  Many evenings when graduate students were busy in the labs doing whatever they needed for their research problems (work in the daytime in the lab was for major professors), they would drop by the office I shared with another student to mooch some of our “cider.” Some stayed in the lab all night after a glass or two.

In l954, when I started work at LSU, there were two wineries in Plaquemines Parish making orange wines, both sweet and dry, from oranges that were not top quality as fresh fruit.  I liked these very much and used to store some in our cold storage rooms, but I found that there were mysterious disappearances and soon gave up that practice. Both wineries belonged to families with roots in the Adriatic coastal area that was called Dalmatia when I was young. It has always been noted for citrus production.

In Tangipahoa Parish, especially where there are large numbers of people with Italian roots, strawberry wine has been a staple product.  One of our co-workers and an uncle made strawberry wine for sale, but some USDA inspector saw crystals of copper and sugar in the wine—the copper from bronze bearings in the crushing machinery—and forced them to stop sales.

The late Professor A.G. Plakidas, who taught Plant Pathology at LSU, had a tiny camp on the beach at Grand Isle, and he called it “Camp Micron.”  It was sparsely furnished, but under each chair he kept a jug of home-made strawberry wine for easy reach.

Blackberries make good wine, but it is hard work to pick enough fruit for that use, and when one has to pick wild berries, the size and challenging thorns can dull one’s enthusiasm quickly.  A neighbor called on me one day to see if I could help him.  He had picked enough wild berries to make about four gallons of wine, which he had put into a beautiful little oak barrel that I admired.  He told me that a baker had given it to him. He had washed it diligently, but when the yeast made enough alcohol, the alcohol leached out of the wood what had originally been in it—vanilla extract… making, for perhaps the first time in history, vanilla blackberry wine. All I could offer were my condolences.

In addition to an occasional glass of cider, Ed O’Rourke, Jr. and Leon Standifer love gardening and are the authors of Gardening in the Humid South (LSU Press, 2002).