The Quality of Grapes and Wine in Relation to Geography: Notions of Terroir at Various Scales

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Abstract
Terroir has many facets. It has been related to: variety of plants and typical food products; territory, name, strategies of advertising and marketing. A viticultural terroir is seldom defined as a region which is related to a particular area with a distinct quality of grapes and their wines. The scale of analysis of the few available discussions by area range from local to a broad spatial coverage: ' local functional ' approaches emphasise quality controlled by ecology and physiology; ' spatial ' approaches depend on the diversity of viticultural environments from area to area. The combination of spatial modelling and geographical information system (GIS) data can update the concept of terroir provided the area, scale and resolution of each so-called terroir -unit are more carefully specified and fully related to viticultural data.