Being And Wine; Terroir, taste and time

And then there is terroir

"In Nossiter’s world, wine is all about terroir, the French concept that wine is “an expression of a place . . . the geology and meteorology of a specific site, [but] also of the history of that land in relation to the vine and, equally importantly, the history of those people who have cultivated that place. It’s the intersection of human culture and agriculture. And each bottle is an expression of that intersection.” (The wine that lost its edginess came from a vineyard that had been sold to someone outside the original vigneron’s family.) Terroir is a gorgeous idea, one rooted in labor and tradition, and it ties in beautifully with the humanist argument that gives Nossiter’s book its title—that wine is a kind of liquid memory because it’s imbued with the character of everyone and everything that made it."
- Melanie Rehak Red Wine and Blue: Americans have a long and contradictory history of imbibing and proscribing. WWW.Bookforum.com Sept/Oct/Nov 2009

This notion of Terroir sounds remarkably similar to Martin Heidegger's notion of the groundedness in Being.