“Terroir.” A chef introduced me to that word, not a sommelier or a winemaker— a chef. He was out bushwhacking and turning over stones for ingredients, and he was quite famous. Too famous to be out glossing over ants to find a succulent to decorate the plate. It’s true, Newfoundland may have one of the shortest growing seasons of anywhere in these parts. The barrenness of 9 months of the year, if you’re not looking, can be stark and captivating (glistening snow is very pretty), but also haunting. Recently, I started a job in the deadpan whiteout of Winter. Fogo Island is known for its 9 seasons. And starting out here in -30 degrees Celsius blizzards did not indicate to me that there would be anything growing. Every pipe froze. The shelves lined themselves with tins and all form of gin and nuclear winter survival food. I did not have even a bottle of wine from the grocery store. At this time, there was nothing to be seen of terroir. Just snow and sleet assaulting my forehead and hammering gently against my car. Among many jobs, my main job was to add to a wine program that is vehemently attached to a sense of place. There is a forager on the payroll and amongst unwelcome ingredients are olive oil and lemon. These two ingredients, along with salt, make up almost the entirety of structural wine pairing theory. Nobody talks about it, but it’s true. That’s the easy part, anyway. I digress. Around March when the whiteout ended and fog encased the trails and the harbour flooded with pack ice from Greenland, we had an opportunity… Go for a walk. See what there is to see. Apparently there were things in the
woods that a human could eat if they were starving, or if they were a chef in a five star hotel; they could transform it into artistry. My guide had been living here for nine years. That’s 63 seasons for those listening. He showed me to a lake and to some fronds poking through the ice. That’s sweet gale. It tastes like cotton candy and bananas when it flowers. Right now it tastes like underripe asparagus but it smells like ginger beer. He took me through the woods. That’s myrrh. Not frankincense and myrrh. This stuff oozing from the tree over there. You can chew on it for an eternity. Myrrh used to be there for people to patch up wounds when there was nobody around with a thread and needle. But it’s bitter and floral and it’s the strangest bubble gum on the planet. Over there by that lamp of sunlight: creeping snowberry vine, which yields one single berry annually, and brightens your breath like a forest floor pocket mint. There were many more. This was all valuable stuff for a chef, even for a bar program that I was inheriting along with my usual wine den. However, how do we match the wines to these kinds of undocumented ingredients? Atlantic Beach greens that taste like wasabi don’t show up in the textbooks. Beach orach is not dissected in the book What to Drink with What You Eat by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen A. Page. In the present again, snow crunching under boot. Time is an ingredient. That’s what the chef said. This was the first thing I learned about this terroir. There was a human element, just like how a horse trotting over the soil is the terroir of an old timey biodynamic vineyard, or at least
“Time is an ingredient.
That’s what the chef said. This was the first thing I learned about this terroir.”
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