Oxidation is a garden-variety wine fault, one that’s easily recognized and, thankfully, rarely encountered in most commercial wines that are filtered and sulfured before they hit the shelves. Thanks in large part to the modern, reductive school of winemaking – one that follows the “less is more” rule of thumb, commercial wines are more likely to suffer from various forms of reduction rather than from oxidation.

When I’m tasting and evaluating wine for quality and style, wines that demonstrate a liveliness always seem to stand out. I know them when I taste them, they seem to be innervated by some intrinsic quality that’s not listed on any tasting rubric I’ve ever encountered. It’s more than acidity alone. Simply put, they seem “alive.”

Until now I’ve never attributed that superlative quality to anything in particular: it could be ideal vintage conditions, a particular approach to farming or type of soil, or more likely the whole (meaning the totality of the terroir) being greater than the sum of its parts.  Research is ongoing but until we find and demonstrate a direct link between soil and finished wine quality, attempts to quantify the influence these microbiomes have on wine is mere conjecture.

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