Blog — what is terroir

If you've spent any time around wine enthusiasts, you've heard the word terroir. It gets thrown around at tastings, written on wine labels, and used to justify why a bottle from one hillside costs three times as much as one from the valley below. But what does it actually mean? The short answer is that terroir is the complete natural environment where a grape is grown. The long answer is a lot more interesting. The Literal Translation Terroir comes from the French word terre, meaning earth or land. But in the wine world it means much more than just the...