Terroir Quotes

“This machine or creature or some combination of both that can manipulate molecules, that can store energy where it will, that can hide the bulk of its intent and its machinations from us. That lives with angels within it and with the vestiges of its own terroir, the hints of its homeland, to which it can never return because it no longer exists.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“You tell yourself this is no less or more real than bowling at Chipper's.[...] That this moment is the same as every other moment, that it makes no difference to the atoms, to the air, to the creature whose walls breathe all around you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer

“Exciting, isn't it? The season? They're rare or unique breeds of plants and animals. Once all our tomatoes were like that. Before preservatives and supermarkets and this commercial food production hell we're living in. Breeds evolved in places based on one evolutionary principle: they tasted better. The point is not longevity or flawlessness. All of our vegetables were biologically diverse, pungent with the nuance of their breed. They reflected their specific time and space---their terroir.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“TERROIR. I looked it up in The World Atlas of Wine in the manager's office. The definition was people talking around it without identifying it. It seemed a bit far-fetched. That food had character, composed of the soil, the climate, the time of year. That you could taste that character. But still. An idea mystical enough to be highly seductive.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“Painfully, because ancestral wisdom was sadly inadequate to the needs of this soil which, on approach, also revealed itself strange. Application of well-tried ways was here not enough. The peasant had constantly to consider his steps, to make decisions in matters that had passed without thought in the Old World—what to plant, and when, and how much, and where. To shoulder this burden of choices, the individual had not now the support of a village council. He acted alone. He had not long before the difficulties were apparent. He found little on his American farm that was familiar.”
― Oscar Handlin, Children of the Uprooted

“Stability, the deep, cushiony ability to take blows, and yet to keep things as they were, came from the special place of these people on the land. The peasants were agriculturalists; their livelihood sprang from the earth. Americans they met later would have called them "farmers", but that word had a different meaning in Europe. The bonds that held these men to their acres were not simply the personal ones of the husbandman who temporarily mixes his sweat with the soil. The ties were deeper, more intimate. For the peasant was part of a community and the community was held to the land as a whole.”
― Oscar Handlin , Children of the Uprooted

“And above all, the fear of putting land to good use.”
― Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden

“Terroir’s direct translation is ‘a sense of place’, and what it means is the sum of the effects of a localized environment, inasmuch as they impact the qualities of a particular product.”
― Jeff VanderMeer