Brian J. Sommers - The Geography of Wine

Wine is more than taste and smell and appearance. There is a great deal of science and artistry in each bottle of wine you drink. What I hope you will come to appreciate in the chapters that follow is that behind the science and the artistry is geography. As geography tends to be a poorly understood subject, few may recognize its proximity or importance to wine. But it is possible to see and even taste its influence.

Most people think that geographers memorize place names and, well, not much else. Thankfully, that is not what it is all about. Geography is a science of space. And as in all sciences our goal is to explain why. We answer why things are where they are. There is a heck of a lot of good geography behind every bottle of wine. My goal is to make you aware of that geography and to convey some of the fun in deepening ones understanding of it.

So what does geography bring to a wine party? It can answer some of the questions that you may already have about wine. Why is Bordeaux a great place for red wines? Why do some places produce Rieslings and others produce chardonnay? How did wine production end up in (pick your favorite region)? How does wine allow us to taste a place? These are the kinds of questions we can answer through geography. So if you are interested in these kinds of questions, you may be a geographer without even knowing it.

There are books on the history of wine, on the tasting of wine, on the quality of and value of vintages, on the wines of specific regions, on growing grapes, on winemaking, and on cooking with wine. There are wine books for idiots, wine atlases, and vineyard photo essays. This book does not compete with any of these. This book is an introduction to the geographic principles that provide a greater understanding of wine. It is a good accompaniment to all of those other wine books that you have on your shelf.

Wine is a fertile ground for the science of geography. This is why viticulture and wine find their way into even introductory geography texts and why courses in the geography of wine appear in colleges throughout North America. Geographers tend to think either in terms of themes or of places. In the world of wine, people think of wine regions and what makes them tick. People who think thematically consider how climate, geology, biology, culture, politics, and economics affect wine and how the geographies that relate to these factors have an impact on wine regions. In this book you will see that I am very much a representative of the thematic way of thinking.

A thematic approach complements all the great regional wine books that are out there. Their text and photographs tell us in vivid detail about the places that produce great wine. Each chapter in this book provides a glimpse into the geography that makes those places great. That is not to say that the regional approach is excluded. The regional close-ups at the end of each chapter are important for demonstrating concepts discussed in the chapter. For example, Mosel vineyards are great examples of how microclimates affect winemaking, and South Africa and Chile illustrate the links between colonialism and wine.

I would like to be able to say that my interest in wine dates back to the summer of 1986, when I spent a month working at an archeological dig in the French Alps. Unfortunately I cant do that. I was blissfully ignorant of the world of wine even though it was all around me. Instead of indulging in the local wines, we drank cheap generic beer. I always try to muster up excuses. I was young and stupid. I was poor. I was led astray by the other American students who were working the dig. There are all sorts of possible explanations. But I cannot blame the villagers who lived around the dig. They were great. They shared their local wines and foods with us every chance that they could. What can I say? It is the curse of youth. Back then we did not realize that drinking generic beer was hazardous to our taste buds.

My interest in wine actually stems from my first semester as a graduate student in the Geography Department at Miami University. Most voyages of wine discovery do not begin in Oxford, Ohio. Mine did, thanks to John Dome. John had been teaching a course called the Geography of Wine at Miami for decades when I first met him. The course drew a regular crowd of locals and large numbers of business majors who saw it as a means of social advancement. I was assigned to the class as Johns graduate assistant.