Is Sense of Place the New Terroir? In Conversation with Elaine Chukan Brown
The term ‘sense of place’ has been used in many different ways and is widely studied in sociology. It is a multidimensional, complex construct used to characterise the relationship between people and spatial settings and to explain why places are perceived as special or unique, and how such places can foster a sense of authentic human attachment and belonging. Anthropologists Feld and Basso define sense of place as the experiential and expressive ways places are known, imagined, yearned for, held, remembered, voiced, lived, contested and struggled over.
Conversely, places that lack a sense of place are sometimes referred to as placeless or inauthentic, even referred to as non-places. The phrase ‘sense of place’ is increasingly used in wine, particularly in the New World. Is ‘sense of place’ the same as terroir? Or does it denote a different understanding of place?
To answer all these questions and more, ARENI spoke to Elaine Chukan Brown. Based in Sonoma, Elaine is a celebrated keynote speaker, educator and wine writer and is one of the world’s top authorities on Californian wine, with a prior career in philosophy and academia. Elaine is Inupiaq and grew up in what is now known as Alaska.
ARENI
What is your own definition of sense of place and is there any difference between sense of place and terroir?
Elaine Chukan Brown
I started talking about wines in terms of place rather than terroir, because I realised that here in California, if I used the word ‘terroir’, it was almost like it triggered all these other ideas that I wasn’t trying to talk about. When I heard other people use that word, the way one person used it from another was inconsistent. And so I thought, okay, I’ll talk about site or site expression if I mean a very specific vineyard place. But if I’m talking about a broader place, like being here in California, then I’ll talk about a sense of place.
I started talking about wines in terms of place rather than terroir, because I realised that here in California, if I used the word ‘terroir’, it was almost like it triggered all these other ideas that I wasn’t trying to talk about. […]The way one person used it from another was inconsistent.
Elaine Chukan Brown
ARENI
What were the connotations that people were associating with terroir when you were using that word?
Elaine Chukan Brown
Interestingly, what I see is that it triggers a lot of defensiveness. And so probably ten years ago, I decided to spend a whole year just trying to understand what people thought we meant by terroir. I integrated it into all my interviews. And I sought out specific viticulturists and winemakers and vintners that I thought are doing work that expresses this notion and just spent a year on this personal research project. And I realised actually a lot of people assumed I meant dirt.
ARENI
So just the soil component.
Elaine Chukan Brown
And I actually think I used the word dirt there intentionally because dirt is inert. It’s soil removed from its place.
So I think there’s a cultural element here. Besides the obvious, ‘terroir’ is a French word. My [degree] is in philosophy and I chose a doctoral program that was what we would call pluralistic, in that a number of the philosophy professors had studied historical philosophy. They were very familiar with ancient Islamic philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy. But then another third of the department were European philosophers. And then there was a British American contingent, because that’s a whole tradition.
In the European tradition, you recognise that language is operating within a culture. This culture is imbued with other concepts. These people interact through the assumptions of what these things mean. There’s a holistic assumption that we live in a holistic environment.
But in the British American tradition, we assume this concept is its own packet, its own object. It operates separately from all these other ideas, which are their own objects. But sometimes we bring the objects together and then they interact. And so, for example, in the British American tradition, ethics would be its own field of study. It is entirely separate from epistemology, the study of knowledge.
I think that these cultures of philosophy can be seen in our cultures of wine in that these people, when I use the word terroir, they assumed I meant dirt. In their mind, dirt is an inert thing that we can study. It’s what the vines are put into. But in a European terroir perspective, the ground is never merely dirt. It’s living soil that helps generate the life of the vine. They create a whole new environment of interaction.
When I use the word terroir, they assumed I meant dirt. In their mind, dirt is an inert thing that we can study. It’s what the vines are put into. But in a European terroir perspective, the ground is never merely dirt. It’s living soil that helps generate the life of the vine. They create a whole new environment of interaction.
Elaine Chukan Brown
And I think the fact that these are very different philosophies of perspective ends up informing how the farming is done, what people think it means to own the vineyard, what that means they can do to the vineyard. It affects the ethics of their viticulture.
ARENI
To go back to a sense of place then. Even for French people, you will find all kinds of nuances in how we understand [terroir]. Is there any similarity with sense of place?
Elaine Chukan Brown
I really don’t think so. I just think it’s as simple as people decided they wanted to stop using the word terroir and so came up with this other option.
ARENI
And so we’ve been talking about definition for, you know, the best part of five minutes now. And we are sometimes teased at ARENI about how much time we spend on definitions. But you mentioned you’ve spent a year on trying to define terroir. Why do these definitions matter?
Elaine Chukan Brown
Defining our terms is step one. It’s the foundation of where we start understanding. So even in conversations with each other, we need to know what we’re talking about, and make sure we have some kind of common language.
ARENI
What would your definition of sense of place be?
Elaine Chukan Brown
I haven’t written down a clear definition yet, but what I think the key point is, is that we put vineyards into a specific location where vines did not exist, presumably until vines were put there. It’s an environmental spot, so to speak.
People are choosing to interact with that exact spot in a very particular way to produce wine. So the place becomes an integration of human intention, whether someone spelled that intention out or not; human intention and then human practice. And the reason I use the word ‘practice’ there is because practice is activity done repeatedly over time. I think we don’t talk about time enough in the context of vineyards and fine wine. The natural element which has now been transformed by human intention.
ARENI
Can you have a sense of place for a region, for example, and how does it interact with the notion of collectivity?
Elaine Chukan Brown
I think that another way to talk about this would be: this question of does this wine express its place? And what does it even mean for a wine to express its place?
If we start there with this question of does a wine express its place, let’s move from the region just to vineyard, just to keep it simple first.
I think we are used to assuming that vineyards have terroir; they have a signature that gets expressed through the wine. In a New World context, or just Pinot producers around the world, you will be hard pressed to find a Pinot producer that does not say, ‘I’m just trying to make wine that expresses its place’. It is the most common statement in the English language in fine wine. But the truth is, if we step back and look honestly at the world of wine, there are very few vineyards in the world that have a strong signature that demand the wine express itself. Most wines might have a signature of place to a certain extent, but they also have a signature of winemaking.
In a New World context, or just Pinot producers around the world, you will be hard pressed to find a Pinot producer that does not say, ‘I’m just trying to make wine that expresses its place’. It is the most common statement in the English language in fine wine. But the truth is, if we step back and look honestly at the world of wine, there are very few vineyards in the world that have a strong signature that demand the wine express itself.
Elaine Chukan Brown
There are absolutely strong vineyards that have strong signatures literally all over the world. There really are, but there’s not a lot of them. So then what are we even talking about when we say wines with a sense of place? Because most wines only have a little sense of place and a lot of winemaking and that doesn’t mean they’re bad wines.
Now if we go to the regional level ― and we’ll stick with Pinot Noir ― there are these vineyards that have really strong site signatures and there are regions that have a really strong impact on how Pinot grows in that region. But here’s the thing. In the world of fine wine, we tend to actually be sceptical of those wines or those regions. We tend to be like, ‘Oh, this isn’t very Pinot’.
ARENI
What I like about sense of place as well is that it allows the role of winemaking. We had a long conversation about Chardonnay, about Meursault, because people were saying, you know, Burgundy is the epitome of wines of place. And I was like, ‘Well, do you remember 20 years ago when Meursault was all new oak and buttery?’
And actually the typicity was defined by winemaking. And when you take the buttery oakiness of Meursault, what are you left with? They’re amazing wines, but, you know, that’s a very strong evolution in terms of style from a place. And now it’s harder to tell Meursault from Puligny-Montrachet because the signature came greatly from winemaking and it’s a different signature today. So I find sense of place also a bit more neutral.
Elaine Chukan Brown
And now, all over the world, there are new waves of winemakers coming in and saying, I don’t need the legal appellation stamp on my bottle. I just want to grow my vines here. Then they’ll come in and they’ll make the same wines outside the guidelines of the appellation system. And so now suddenly we’re getting a whole new taste of that region. And then, like you’re saying, it complicates our recognition and it upsets this question of typicity. Climate change is another layer where the growing conditions of a place are no longer typical either. So it’s complicating our ideas of what is typicity, What is the role of variety versus winemaking? You know, what is place and what is good even? It’s all being complicated.
ARENI
Words like authenticity, typicity, identity: they can be similar and different. To what extent are those three words important for the future of fine wine?
Elaine Chukan Brown
I think when cultures go through enormous challenges and periods of major change, people hold onto their values more strongly. And we are seeing that on so many levels worldwide today. And just to keep it simpler, climate change is an enormous pressure point, but it’s triggering all these other pressure points simultaneously. To give a philosophical point, we have to be asking, what do we care about? To go back to the wine world, the Master Sommelier exams, the Master of Wine exams, they both include tests that demand you taste wine without knowing what they are and then name them and give reasons why. It has become far more difficult just even in the last five years, because typicity is disappearing.
When cultures go through enormous challenges and periods of major change, people hold onto their values more strongly. And we are seeing that on so many levels worldwide today. […]Climate change is an enormous pressure point, but it’s triggering all these other pressure points simultaneously. To give a philosophical point, we have to be asking, what do we care about?
Elaine Chukan Brown
ARENI
How does one retain that sense of place in a changing world? And I was wondering if you could talk about that in reference to your Inupiaq community and in reference to what you are seeing in the wine world with both of your hats.
Elaine Chukan Brown
To set up the answer I think one of the things to keep in mind is that when someone lives in a city full time, it’s really hard to imagine what it means to live in a place where you are integrated into that environment. The people and the landscape are co-creative of that place.
I think one of the things to keep in mind is that when someone lives in a city full time, it’s really hard to imagine what it means to live in a place where you are integrated into that environment. The people and the landscape are co-creative of that place.
Elaine Chukan Brown
So my family on both sides is indigenous to what’s now Alaska, and they’re both coastal or island peoples. My mom’s side is from the islands of Alaska and my dad’s side is from the far western coast. The point being these are water peoples, right? So, imagine now you’re in a remote landscape surrounded by tundra and bedrock, always going out into the ocean or neighbouring rivers to gather the resources you need for daily life.. And so now imagine, though, that the same variable weather conditions we are used to finally admitting is happening in vineyards are happening in these towns, but they’re coastal towns. The storms are more intense, the ocean is more violent. You live on the edge of it. The temperature of the sea has increased, thereby changing the ecosystem in the water itself. And so also the food you have access to, everything about this place you live is changing and becoming more chaotic. And yet you must live there because you do live there.
The sense of place, everything about it has changed, because how you live day to day is different. And I think that most of us that live in cities forget that as hard core and gritty and edgy as cities feel they are a protective environment ― they protect us from the natural elements that are becoming more chaotic and severe in climate change.
And this is a parallel impact in vineyards. The thing about fine wine is that we have a way to make it more understandable to humans that the natural world is changing because people love wine. I think a lot of people who aren’t in the wine world forget that wine is an agricultural product. They forget it depends on farming. We assume it’s just obvious. But for a lot of people, wine is a drink. That said, wine compels people. People fall in love with wine. Wine has a romance to it. We as an industry have the power to compel people and change minds and motivate them. And I think it’s our obligation from that luxury, the privilege we have of being in the wine world, to find ways to motivate people, to support efforts to make change.
ARENI
You’re saying that the sense of place in your community has changed drastically because the world they’re living in is changing drastically. But we’ve talked about authenticity and people wanting authenticity more. What does it mean to be authentic? What does it mean to be authentic in the wine world?
Elaine Chukan Brown
The philosophical ethical answer is that it comes down to integrity. How are we going to channel our committed values through the choices we make into our everyday behaviour? Authenticity is acting with integrity on a regular basis. So that we know what this place is over time because the vineyard team, the wine team is being consistent over time. They have chosen their values and they consistently make choices that deliver them through the vineyard and the winemaking. And so over time, we come to see what is that place authentically. For people it’s the same. If you’re consistently acting with integrity, who you are shows up over time. That is your authentic self.
ARENI
We’ve been talking about wines of place and the opposite may be wines of style. And you were saying, we say we want wine of place, but actually we don’t want it. We want wine of styles because maybe they’re a bit more comfortable. How does sense of place translate in a bottle and how would you recognise a wine of place in the bottle from a wine of style?
Elaine Chukan Brown
A lot of my job is going around tasting hundreds of wines in a couple of days, and then the next place there are hundreds more. And I think sometimes the things we think we know about wine or winemaking keeps us from seeing that it’s the place that we’re talking about. I gave a seminar in March where we had ten wines. Part of the exercise was us talking through what we were seeing and trying to discern what was there. And there is the third wine. There were a lot of green notes in the nose.
This guy from the audience was, very bravely, offering insight, but he was determined that green notes always mean whole cluster. But then as soon as he said whole cluster, he assumed it had to be either Syrah or Pinot. So his first assumption was forcing him through all this logic of place and winemaking. And I kept saying, okay, well, let’s remember, sometimes green notes can mean a cooler vintage or a cooler region. But he couldn’t see this. In the end, it turned out it was Merlot from the North Fork of Long Island in a region that was only just warm enough to ripen Merlot and Cab Franc. So, his assumption of whole cluster was not unreasonable in one sense, but his unwillingness to imagine other things could be in place kept him from even considering Merlot.
My point is, I don’t know the answer to your question. I’m working this out still, but I’m interested in these ways that we keep ourselves from seeing what a wine is because we’ve assumed we know these other things. I don’t think it’s an easy thing to say how do we discern wines of style versus wines of place? And I’m still working on this.
ARENI
Circling back to the beginning, do you think you would say that a sense of place is the new terroir?
Elaine Chukan Brown
I don’t know. I’m skeptical of how much people want to do the work to understand these things. I think it’s a small contingent of the wine world that is actually invested in understanding the place they grow their wine and trying to translate that through the cellar into the glass. And let’s be honest, there’s not a lot of money to be made in wines that genuinely express their place.
I do think it’s an important turn of phrase to move to talking about wines of place, because it allows for more regions of the world to be part of the conversation. There’s a way in which it confers respect and demands that wines of place really can be made all over the world. And that piece of it is really important.
I do think it’s an important turn of phrase to move to talking about wines of place, because it allows for more regions of the world to be part of the conversation.
Elaine Chukan Brown
But the truth is, to make wines of place demands a lot of time, a really long term commitment, and the investment, both financially and personally, to be able to do that. And there will never be a lot of people that can simply commit to that and actually follow through. So I don’t know that we’ll have more and more fine wine, more and more wines of place in that sense. But I do think that this shift in phrasing allows more people to be part of the conversation, and that’s important.
This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. To enjoy the entire conversation, listen to the podcast.
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