Terroir, noun (pronounced "ter-wahr"): The conditions in which a food is grown or produced and that give the food its unique characteristics. Dictionary.com
A Taste of Somewhereness
Our neighbors up the road here in Colrain, MA are credited with the revival of the hard cider industry. They moved here, to the land of old apple trees, in the 70s and started brewing the historic drink in their basement. Word grew, and for the past 25+ years, this area has been home to an annual festival in November called Franklin County Cider Days.
Their cider, made from apples we see every day, tastes like the rain that falls on those trees and the soil they are grown from. One of my favorite varieties had a handwritten label that said "Snow Cider." When I asked about the name, Judith Maloney told me, "Remember that snow we had in early October? We had to run out and harvest all the heirloom apples while they were covered with snow." Thus, "Snow Cider" was born. That's something I love best about the festival: all the stories the cider-makers tell about their particular brew.
One day I popped into a fine wine store in Northampton and they happened to be having a tasting. To be honest, I'm not a drink connoisseur, so I just went straight over to the bottle I was going to buy. That's when I overheard the wine rep saying, "This wine is from the Mosel region of Germany, grown along a river that flows to France. It's an area that has produced this variety of wine since the 11th century." He said its taste was due to the blue slate soil, and grown on steep south facing cliffs, and that some of the vines were 120 years old. I took a sip and wondered if my German ancestors had also tasted this wine or experienced the flavor of that particular soil and sunlight. It was a Riesling, which is now my favorite kind wine.
I was surprised to learn there is a word for all this that is well known in the food and wine industry. It's terroir, a French word pronounced "ter-war." One website defined the word as "the combination of factors including soil, climate, and sunlight that gives wine grapes their distinctive character." It's also known as "the taste of the soil" and "the notion that food has specific qualities defined by a sense of place."
There is another word to describe the "elusive combination of micro-climate, soil and aspect that lifts one wine above another." It's "somewhereness." This word was coined by Bill Ryan in the 90s when he said there are "hundreds of dull, cookie-cutter wines" with little or no sense of "somewhereness."
I think somewhereness is the heart of sense-of-place work. There are many places we encounter that have a generic or cookie-cutter feel -- like the expanse of built landscapes described by James Howard Kunstler in his book "The Geography of Nowhere."
My work has been informed by my own experiences of sometimes not knowing where I am, or having no sense of place because it's just not obvious. A town's unique character is covered over by shopping malls or highways. To know a place, and to know its "somewhereness," you often have to look hard for the layers of time and story. You can start with geology and the lay of the land, moving on to the natural world, and to the peoples who have lived there before, and still do, up to the people who live there today, including you.
Because place can hold many, many layers of story, I often say that no one owns the story of a place, we all do.
Somewhereness, or a sense of place, is an inclusive approach for exploring the meaning of place. It combines what you see, feel and know about a place. It includes your stories and connections, as well as those of the people who have come before you. Sense of place is what it's meant to others, and what it means to you, all at the same time.
Seeing these layers is foundational for connecting to your sense of place. It's the soil that stories are grown from. And your unique perspective or experience is the flavor you bring to each story.
Everything happens somewhere.
If you want to explore more about your sense of somewhereness from your past or present, consider joining our 8-week writing session, The Writer's Path. Every story begins someplace. We start on Thursday, January 19th at 5:30 pm ET. For all levels of experience and all kinds of writers.