Here’s a dictionary definition of the French term terroir: “the combination of factors including soil, climate, and sunlight that gives wine grapes their distinctive character.” Think sun-baked flinty soil, gnarly old vines, south-facing hillsides that are so steep that machines cannot be used on them; such characteristics are said to make up uniquely regional, often, indeed unique to the vineyard, taste.
What’s missing in this definition is the human element. Terroir, argues historian Tamara L. Whited, is a “concept positing a set of tight connections among foods, their places of origin, and the skilled labor that produces them.” The land informs terroir; the land itself has been intimately shaped by people over the centuries.
Terroir has expanded from wine to other local, artisanal foods under the influence of regional/national gastronomic marketing and the Slow Food movement. The French appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) and the European “protected denomination of origin” are now familiar to consumers beyond European borders.
“The modern notion of terroir has grown in France,” writes Whited, “from the eighteenth-century insertion of food products within highly structured markets for luxury goods and, subsequently, from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century emergence of gastronomy and the celebration of regional cuisines through gastronomic tourism.”
Whited calls terroir a “particularly French conception of cultural territory.” She examines the case of “a profoundly local product [that has] acquired the cachet of sustainability in the era of branding and commercialization”: Ossau-Iraty, a sheep’s milk cheese from the western French Pyrenees.
Whited argues that terroir isn’t only the result of “the promotional, scientific, and cultural constructions.” It’s also a product of historical and ecological shifts, “a complex and malleable product of the interactions over time between biophysical and anthropogenic factors.”
For example, in the Pyrenees, fire has been used to create and maintain the high-altitude pastures known as estives for seven thousand years. Browsing and trampling by sheep and cattle also created these pastures. Livestock population in this region peaked between 1875 and 1880. People, however, left—as they did from many rural areas. Regional “depopulation led to higher livestock-to-shepherd ratios and insufficient labor to perform pastoral fires.” After World War II, fire almost completely disappeared as a management tool. But it has come back: Whited notes that some 3,200 burnings were carried out between October 2016 and March 2017 alone.
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One of the traditional shepherding rights in the community-managed pastures was that of building a summer cabane for shelter and cheese-making. Cheese-making began as way of preserving highly-perishable milk. It was peasant food, locally produced and locally consumed. The cheeses of the Pyrenees were not exported. When mentioned by metropolitan sources up through the nineteenth century, they were usually disparaged.
But starting around 1910, the raw material of Pyrenean meadows, the sheep’s milk itself, became nationally marketable. It became one of the major sources of Roquefort, the first French cheese to gain AOC status (1925). Roquefort production sourced milk from across southern France, which sounds contrary to the idea of terroir, except in this case the terroir factor was attributed to the caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, where the cheese was aged.
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By the last quarter of the twentieth century, Roquefort production had shrunk because of competition from mass-produced cheeses. No longer able to sell their milk to the Roquefort industry, Pyrenean livestock owners and cheese makers were forced to “reinvent” a tradition: Pyrenean sheep’s milk cheese. AOC status was granted to this in 1980, with criteria “that allowed the maintenance of key differences between the Basque and Béarnais varieties of Ossau-Iraty.”
Whited notes that a great deal of regional, national, and European Union funding has contributed to the “rejuvenation of pastoralism” in the region. In 2013, some 500 shepherds were working in Béarn and 250 in neighboring Soule, managing 120,000 sheep—creating “a terrain of quality products and sustainable development, a test case, at least, for other temperate alpine regions.”
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