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The Rain of Terroir

The word would be French.

Terroir. Like connoisseur. Meaning, of course, earth. A patch of earth. A very particular patch of earth. With its very particular rainfall, its particular winters, its sunshine. Its acidity. And yes, its people, whereby a local ethnic trait such as, well, say obsessive humming transmutes into a subtle note in the wine produced from that patch of earth year after year after year. And some hallowed patches just happen to produce the most rarified wine or sauerkraut or tobacco or chocolate on the face of the earth. Lucky the heir to the world’s supreme sauerkraut acre. Or a tiny celestial vineyard in Burgundy or Bordeaux. That 53 Sschrunk Flossentuth Bongomme Graffitte is worth its weight in gold. For the snootiest chocolate snoot, only chocolate from a small plantation in Madagascar will do. And for the poetry snob, only a few small farms in New Hampshire in a dry summer can give rise to the most lucid American plainsong, and one or two streets in the East Village can ever hope to match the abstruse sonorities of the great Mallarm

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Where have all the manners gone? Three things give rise to my query. First, the failure of folks day by day to just say thank you for an act of kindness or generosity. Second, as reported in the New York Times recently, the dilapidated sportsmanship of more than the usual handful of spoiled Olympic athletes who just can’t grasp how they could lose or why bible-thick Omaha steaks aren’t steaming away on every streetcorner in Turin. For heroes like them. And third, the rancorous mooing between herds that is the picture of current cultural discourse. Did someone say fair mindedness? What purple critter are you? A left-wing pundit (could just as well have been a conservative one) recently extolled the virtue of passion while defending an instance of clearly barbaric personal assault. We have a new it word, I suspect. Passion. A blanket exoneration of every kind of stupid, well, mooing.

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