Andrew Jefford: Challenging beliefs on tasting wine and terroir

Shocked, I sat in the front row. And smiling. Lengthy tutored tastings of this sort are often smooth with platitudes and buttered with praise. Instead, we got Pedro the Iconoclast, hacking away at the received wisdom of the wine world.

You know what? No one said anything; no one heckled; no one walked out. (The wines, it’s true, were too good to miss.) Mental note: catch up with Pedro later.

This was the Rioja Centennial Celebration (see my May 2026 column), and the tasting compere was Spain’s first Master of Wine, Pedro Ballesteros Torres. He began with unprecedented honesty: ‘I know less and less how to taste, looking at the labels. I admit it: I’m influenced by labels. If a friend has made the wine, I like the wine.’

None of the assumed omniscience and infallibility of the celebrity taster; instead, a welcome truth: we all taste subjectively and emotionally. See the label; forget objectivity. ‘The problem,’ he told me later, ‘is that the most influential tasting is not undertaken blind.’ True.

But Pedro was just getting warmed up. ‘We are destroying wilderness with agriculture, and thanks to our destruction we are sitting here well-fed today. I am proud to be part of this destruction movement. We need to call into question the notion of “natural” and “purity” in wine. It’s not true that wine can be produced naturally. You need a high level of intervention – and this is excellent.’

I followed up with him in our chat, during which he described skilful farming and wine-growing as being like successful parasitism. ‘A good parasite doesn’t destroy its host. Nature is not our friend; it’s the circumstances of our activity. We fight to defend our interests, but not to destroy our host.’ If he was a winemaker, he says he would try to maximise biodiversity to create resistant vines – but avoid dogma in the defence of his crop.

His views on terroir raised eyebrows, too. ‘The mathematical size of your terroir,’ he told the bamboozled throng, ‘is exactly the same size as the vessel in which you make the wine.’

This needed unpicking. Pedro, it turned out, considers the accepted notion of terroir as ‘fatalist: you’re here, you have this soil, this climate, this tradition, and that determines whether you make a good or great wine’. That’s wrong, he said.

He sees terroir (he prefers to use the Spanish word terruño) as a place made up of five spaces, five moments of becoming. The first ‘is the grapes, and only the grapes: never the wine’. That’s exactly what the vineyard has given.

The second terruño is the transformation of fermentation – ‘and it has nothing to do with the vineyard’. This is why the contents of a fermenting vat is the only true terroir unit.

The third terruño is oxidative, pre-bottling ageing (which changes everything yet again) and the fourth is reductive ageing in a tank or bottle (ditto).

The fifth terruño, finally, is ‘you and me: what happens in our bodies when we drink the wine’. We are all different microbial communities reacting in different ways to complex chemical substances: a singularity none of us can escape, that’s best acknowledged. Terroir is a product of all these changes and exchanges, not a soil myth.

One final inconoclasm. ‘1 January 1986 was the most important date in the history of Spanish wine. This was when Spain became part of the European Union. At that moment, the best Spain was born: it joined the developed world; wines and winemakers began to travel freely; the circle of appreciation grew. Spain’s wine regions acquired self-confidence – because others trusted them.’

The message here is that yes, politics matters, because it’s politics that creates (or excludes) what might or might not be possible; wine is not apolitical. And, Pedro and I agreed, wine has reached a dangerous pass. It’s challenged – by tariffs, by health alarms, by trade dislocations... and by attacks on the European culture and ways of thinking with which it is indissolubly associated.

‘Once again,’ says Pedro, ‘we have to reinvent wine to continue to live wine.’

In my glass this month

It’s hard to describe just how much the Jefford household recently enjoyed the 2024 Pošip from Grgić (working in Dalmatia, not California), grown on the island of Korčula, Croatia. It’s aromatically gorgeous, packed with powdery mimosa fragrance, while the palate is full of freshness yet vinous, sinewy and full, with a back flavour hovering creatively between mango and green olive. Perfect at 13.5% alcohol: any less, and you might miss out on that inner wealth, mellowness and expansiveness.

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