[merry_flame]

I was extremely pleasantly surprised by the fact that Ethiopians seem to sharre a proper understanding of terroir for qat and honey and, boy, are there major differences from one region to the next. (Astonishingly I didn't perceive anything similar for coffee, which was dark roasted almost everywhere I went, despite astounding bioclimatic and genetic conditions throughout the coffee belts.) The Chinese certainly have something like it, but probably more refined and articulated around much higher social classes. Certain teas were paired with mineral waters from a specific source for instance — that far exceeds the more rustic French notion of terroir.

That being said, terroir is something more that just "land" and includes the idea of common rules or ways of doing things, and of course genetics.

When a type of cheese can only use the highly creamy milk from a specific breed of cow, the result is highly specific and tasty, yet it doesn't express anything that's really related to the land itself at that stage. Camembert is widely understood as a typical terroir-expressing product, yet it would be pretty much the same if it were produced elsewhere than in Normandy with the same production methods, breeds, yeasts, and same access to pasture for cows for instance. It's the common approach that lends terroir to it. (Well, theoretically, because the an unpasteurized Camembert fermier will actually be more similar to a creamy, soft-ripened farmer's Brie than a pasteurized industrial Camembert, the slight difference is butterfat content notwithstanding).

The fetishizing actually transformed the way local products are perceived and grown, by lending importance to the idea that instead of going for something generic, we should be aiming to express something more, the way some grape varietal can express the underlying mineral bedbrock (as with Chardonnay in Burgundy's Chablis area, which is geologically a region of Kimmeridgian limestone). It's posh to some extent. I remember meeting a old wine producer from the Loire region at a wine tasting a few years back who was befuddled by some of the audience's questions and that basically asked us to keep the complex questions for his son because he had only been trained to make wine that was nice to drink in the same way his forefathers did and just had no idea in what way his soil and grapes were special because those were the only ones he knew.

A lot of it is fake/commercial gatekeeping and poring over details of DOC regulations can be quite disturbing at times. For instance, DOC foie gras produced from Barbary ducks, which cannot naturally deliver fat liver like geese and that were never used before being hyperselected by the French agricultural research institute INRA in the postwar era. Meat products or cheese that use generic methods that could be applied anywhere seem to be the worst offenders. DOC cheese with clonal lines of moulds, give me a break… DOC wine in Italy seems to be similarly impacted if I'm to believe Jonathan Nossiter of 'Mondovino''s fame. Interestingly, one of the Italian winemakers in his follow-up documentary 'Natural Resistance' actually says something along the lines of "there's no concept of terroir in Italian"" and basically everyone in that documentary use the French word. I really do think it's an interesting, elusive concept, but one that intuitively clicks with people throughout the globe that don't necessarily have as mature a word for the same ideas and that most French people don't necessarily understand either because of how commercialized it is and how prevalent the paradigm of uniformization has become. Everyone wants terroir, but Camembert uses albino moulds because everyone wants them perfectly white, cider comes with labels mentioning how the liquid might be cloudy but it remains perfectly safe to drink, etc.