RL
Cartogrape
/
Collections
/
Terroir Starter Pack
Terroir Starter Pack
3
All Collections
2024 Willamette Pinots
2021 Washington Cabs
White Wines
Red Wines
Terroir Starter Pack
6w
Terroir Starter Pack
Terroir 101 | Heat spikes
•••
A different thing from a warm season, so I score it separately. A region can sit right inside its window all summer and still get taken apart by a fortnight of extremes at the wrong moment. Past about 35°C the vine shuts down to protect itself. Ripening stops, sugar keeps climbing anyway, and the balance the whole season was building comes apart in a few days. The average tells you what a place is. The spikes tell you what happened to a vintage.
more
3
6w
Terroir Starter Pack
Terroir 101 | Frost
•••
The most brutal thing in the data. Once the buds open in spring the shoots have no protection at all, and one freezing night kills them. The vine pushes a second set, but they carry less fruit and ripen later, so a frost in April is still in the glass in November. There's almost no room in this one. A few nights takes it to nothing. That isn't the model being harsh, it's just what happens — and it's why there are helicopters over vineyards every spring.
more
2
6w
Terroir Starter Pack
Terroir 101 | Dryness
•••
Rain minus evaporation through ripening — whether the vine is running a small thirst or a surplus. A small thirst is what you want. Berries stay little and everything concentrates. Both ends are bad. Rain at harvest dilutes and rots. Real drought just stops the vine dead. What you're after is a dry finish to the season, not a dry place.
more
2
6w
Terroir Starter Pack
Terroir 101 | Cool nights
•••
Days build the sugar. Nights decide how much of it survives. When the temperature drops after dark the vine slows down and the acid and the aromatics stay where they are. When it doesn't drop, the fruit keeps burning through the night and you lose exactly the things that would have given the wine lift. Same sunshine, completely different wine. It's why the coast works and the valley twenty miles inland doesn't.
more
2
6w
Terroir Starter Pack
Terroir 101 | Heat
•••
The biggest single piece of the score. Warmth isn't a ladder where more is better. It's a window. Under it the fruit never really ripens — green, hard, and no winemaker rescues that. Over it the sugar runs off ahead of the flavour and the whole thing goes soft. Every grape's window sits somewhere different. That's most of what people mean when they say a grape belongs somewhere.
more
3
6w
Terroir Starter Pack
Terroir 101 | What the score is made of
•••
Five measurements of one growing season in one place, weighted and added up. Warmth and stability carry the most, then how dry the ripening ran, then the nights, then the air. None of it is a taste. Nobody swirled anything. It's the weather and the ground — the part that's settled long before anyone opens the bottle. Going through them one at a time over the next few posts.
more
2
10w
Terroir Starter Pack
Cartogrape.com
•••
Terroir based wine discovery.
9
1
Follow Cartogrape
Follow
By submitting, you agree to our
Terms
and
Privacy Policy
© 2026
Privacy
Terms
Support
Report
Cookies
