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.”

“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.”