No Such Thing as Terroir?

In Search of Terroir—Vintners Nurturing the Expression of Their Terroir

The task of “terroir vintners” is to craft the expression of their terroir. To put it in musical terms, they perform a score composed by the terroir; for terroir to emerge, the performance must allow it to express itself fully rather than conceal it through overpowering practices. Producers dedicated to the production of wines “with a strong terroir expression” proceed quite simply by rejecting any “unnecessary” practice that might get in the way of its expression. At the vine stage, they attempt to maximize its expression by trying not to disturb or interfere with it, and by collecting as many traces of terroir as possible. In doing this, they seek winegrowing practices that are more “respectful of the terroir” and take an interest in practices considered environmentally friendly. Crucially, these “terroir vintners” refuse altogether the use of synthetic fertilizers that feed the plant with nutriments alien to the terroir and stimulate a yield that would dilute the terroir’s expression. They replant traditional, little-known grape varieties instead of fashionable ones that give wines a “commercial” quality unrelated to the “terroir quality” they seek.

At the cellar stage, terroir vintners must take a backseat and allow the terroir to express itself rather than attempting to stamp the wine with their own particular style or touch. Wine-making techniques to transform the grapes into wine must be as unobtrusive as possible. All methods of rectification or enrichment ⁴ —such as adding artificial yeasts and enzymes, new oak barrels for “aromatization,” or sulfites for conservation—are banned or limited. Advanced technologies and innovations allegedly manipulate and “artificialize” the taste of wine by distancing it from its terroir expression. These vintners are more attracted to traditional practices, not in a “back-to-basics” way, but because they do not “mark” the wine as much and because it was these traditions that contributed to the emergence of terroirs and their typicity.

As a noninterventionist process, the making of terroir wines relies on what could be called a “know-how-not-to.” Vintners remain producers, but not in the sense of artists who create styles according to their whims or those of the critics evaluating their results. They are craftspeople in search of an authentic terroir quality, subject to their raw materials and impervious to the siren songs of “demand,” “fashion,” or “productivity” that tend to lead terroir quality astray, and they would like to see AOCs better protected against this.

The less terroir vintners do, the more the vines will “express their terroir.” Indications of this are found in the behavior of plants. Returning to the vineyards’ self-sufficient biological balance results in more consistent production rates and more resistant vines that are less sensitive to extreme weather conditions. Changes can also be observed in the wines’ taste.

Vintner3: What we get are wines that somehow speak more, if we have more respect for the soil, the grape, then the wines are a little bit more authentic, more mineral, a little sharper. (Vintner3, PdL, PF: 2) ⁵ .

However, technical asceticism does not miraculously reveal terroir. The analysis of its emergence requires lengthy critical discussion about the quality of the resulting wines.

The Changing Taste of Wines

This analysis depends in particular on what vintners interpret as the best way of doing things to elicit terroir expression. This issue gives rise to a number of disagreements, for example, between supporters of terroir wine on one hand, and those of natural, sulfite-free wine on the other. Whereas the latter support the least possible intervention on the part of the vintner so as to let nature, and therefore terroir, do their work and express themselves; the former, on the contrary, believe in a reasoned degree of intervention, particularly when it comes to sulfites. Due to its antioxidant and antibacterial properties, sulfite is a key adjuvant in the wine-making process. Like all other additives, it does not belong to the wine itself, which is why its use is contested, especially among “natural” vintners. “Sulfite-free wines” tasted in cellars are generally thought to be more interesting, complex, and natural than others. But they are also more versatile; they evolve rapidly, become sensitive, fragile, and prone to refermentation and oxidation. Such “accidents” can be partly kept in check with a qualified distribution network, a flawless mastery of cellar hygiene, and the complete transformation of sugar into alcohol, but these wines nevertheless soon tend to take on an oxidized, “evolved” character.

“Naturalist” vintners see this as a natural expression of terroir, but their opponents complain about the excessively conventional taste typical of sulfite-free wines:

Vintner5: Some organic people work without sulfite, and you can see the result. The wines don’t last [they get oxidized]. You can tell when a wine is sulfite-free. And I don’t like it, because it lacks identity, you don’t know if you’re drinking a cabernet, a syrah, a merlot…. (Vintner5, PdL, PF: 7)

For them, the absence of sulfite damages the perception of terroir as much as its excess because the overpowering taste of the ensuing oxidation masks its expressions. The right technique is the one that leaves no trace.

Proponents of “natural ways of doing” defend the oxidation of wines as a particular trait of this authentic terroir quality, which, they argue, used to constitute a classic note of wines and did not prevent drinkers from perceiving terroir. They tend to prefer a “light oxidized note” to filtration and other alternative techniques which, in their opinion, weakens the expression of the terroir. According to terroir vintners, “natural wines” are an extreme answer to a pertinent question—a “know-how-not-to” that goes too far. More generally, they call for a measured, considered use of technology. To let nature express itself does not mean leaving the vats unchecked. Nature cannot express itself on its own; someone has to make it speak, and that requires both great skills and a well-equipped cellar. It is true that practices must be stripped of artifice, but this must be done selectively and skillfully.

Natural vintner14: Under no circumstance do we add yeast, that’s the first thing! Then, again, you have to think, there are lots of very complex elements. For example, the fermentation temperature: some yeasts don’t work below a certain fermentation temperature. And that can lead to deviations in taste, etc. So you still need to know what you’re doing. Although they are natural, some yeasts give very unpleasant tastes to the wine. So you could say “what a great terroir taste!” No, these are yeasts we haven’t selected, we didn’t want them and they appear and give a taste of stables—dirty stables at that—and these are natural tastes. (Natural vintner14, PdL, FC: 4)

The return to nature promoted by “naturalist” vintners is suspected of hiding a lack of technical mastery; to this, they retort that a change in taste is the necessary “price to pay” for regaining an authentic terroir.

The Rejection of Atypical Wines by AOC Tasting Panels

Vintners involved in devising the most efficient techniques for enhancing the expression of terroir have noticed a change in the taste of their wines, and they are not the only ones—AOC tasting panels have also noticed changes. ⁶ However, instead of equating change with a better terroir expression as producers do, the panels criticize these wines for failing to “conform to the organoleptic standards of their appellation’s typicity.” Panels sometimes refuse to grant the AOC label to certain wines, despite the fact that they originate from an “appellation” region and fully comply with the specifications.

The decisions of AOC-tasting panels are not final; they signal “faults” for the producers to correct and rectify their wine. However, the incriminated producers consider these prescribed changes as the epitome of bad practice denaturing terroir quality. Why should they have to rectify a wine when it is the product of an intense search for terroir? Is this not proof that AOCs have lost their way and that its panels are incompetent at assessing terroir quality? According to terroir defenders, technical innovations in viticulture and wine making, as well as the market-driven choices that some have taken for their wines, have caused these panelists to lose their gustatory references, leaving them incapable, or unwilling, to recognize an authentic terroir quality. For defenders of “terroir,” it is the judges’ taste that has been distorted by their incompetence rather than the taste of their wines through good practices, and therefore it is the judges’ tastes that need to be revised and not the new terroir wines that uphold the true meaning of AOCs.

Vintners constantly taste their own wines as well as those of their colleagues for inspiration and to fuel their thinking on the best ways of expressing terroir. However, producers are not the only ones to evaluate terroir wines; like any other commodity, wines are sold and therefore subject to the appreciation of retailers, distributors, clients, and also—as with other “quality” wines—wine critics and experts….

Instrumenting the Proof of Terroir

All wine critics claim that their goal is to produce an “objective” judgment on wines (Paumard and Millet 2000). Wine guides and selection lists all present themselves as compiled tasting notes and rankings, thereby adding “objective” proofs of their reliability (Teil 2010). Most stress the use of blind tasting as promoted by taste neurophysiologists and sensory evaluation manuals.

But even if they do not always say so, critics also taste “sighted,” with the label apparent, on numerous occasions—during fairs, among professionals, at home, or when tasting in cellars in the presence of vintners. Spanish wine critic José (Peñín 1998) even declares in his guides, La guïa Peñín de los vinos that he prefers and practices sighted tasting. He finds that discussions and exchanges with vintners or vineyard technical supervisors are crucial for learning about what they have tried to achieve, about the properties of their wines, whether desired or not, stimulated or appearing unexpectedly. This knowledge then focuses the taster’s attention on distinctive facets or traits of the wines.

Is this merely a matter of extending the evaluation of a wine to the quality of the winery owner, his or her viticulture, or wine-making techniques—as organic wine guides do—or even to the beauty and soul of the estate—as in the Guide de charme des vins de France (Couvreur and Gerbelle 1998)? Not only do organic and tourism-related wines have to be good, but they also need to be produced according to defined techniques in the case of the former, and in a pleasant location presented by a friendly owner for the latter.

Neither the practices nor the owners’ charm matter per se for wine critics interested in terroir. These points only contribute to the analysis of wines insofar as wine is not just wine, but the individual result of a production process combining grapes from specific vines, practices devoted to highlight them, and a certain interpretation of its quality by the vintner. And this information is only available in the context of a sighted tasting with the producer.

Vintners’ accounts of their engagement, intentions, and technical choices, as well as visits to the estates and their facilities can offer tasters precious indications about what they might expect to find in a wine. These are essential in order to separate the winegrower’s “intentions” from the result, or to compare different interpretations of terroir. However, close relations between judges and the object of their assessment can lead to doubts about their impartiality and suspicions of bribery ⁷ whether voluntary or not. Critics are often the first to try to dispel this it by comparing the results of both sighted and blind tasting. ⁸

M. CV REB: I start by tasting blind, then supplement this with sighted tasting…. The point of blind tasting is a very personal interest. I must say that, for myself, who feels close to the affective side of wine, it’s about not suffering the consequences. It allows me to try lots of wines from growers whom I appreciate for their human qualities [in the same way] that I would for my jackass neighbor, an idiot I know and can’t stand. But I want to taste them on an equal footing. For me, blind tasting is useful because I know the labels too well in a way. (Wine critic REB, GT, p. 13)

Blind tasting often brings its share of surprises—the taster may discover that he or she has not identified a wine, or that it appeared under a different light, “detached from the a priori expectations ascribed to it.” But it does not make the differences in judgment vanish. Critics are also likely to award very different scores to the same wines. ⁹ Those who believe that they know the truth of terroir quality or perception blame their colleagues’ incompetence. Although some critics pretend to be the sole true judges of the quality of wines, most tend to be more modest. The more experienced they are, the more they will insist on what remains to be learned—an attitude we would be wrong to dismiss as false modesty. For the majority of critics, the discrepancy of scores reflects the “diversity of individual tastes,” yet, there is nothing relativistic about the appreciation of terroir.

Tasters usually attribute two causes to these differences in judgment: first, their own particular “tastes” and “sensibilities”; second, the manifestations of the product that have escaped them or, on the contrary, have monopolized their attention. The former are reasonably easy to identify, and their knowledge is crucial for tasters to compare their own judgments; the latter are tied to the product or the occasion of its tasting, and offer as many paths for tasting again, trying to perceive what escaped them at first, guarding themselves from their own perception, and furthering their knowledge about the taste of the wine under evaluation.

The peremptory nature of the scores published by wine critics is in contrast with the unrelenting reengaging of their tasting; in the words of a wine critic, “we’re never through with wines” (Lecouty 1987), their quality never ceases to be tasted and explored. They appear never to miss an opportunity for tasting a wine afresh, at a restaurant, in a cellar with the producer, alone at home…. Neither is there a single correct technique that would by itself reveal all the qualities of a wine. Each protocol highlights certain elements (in blind mode, the taster; in sighted mode, and the product) at the expense of others (in blind mode, the product; in sighted mode, and the taster).

The quality of wines is not something that critics test and recognize; rather, it emerges in the process of being experienced by the whole collective, of which each critic is only a single spokesperson. By multiplying the occasions and techniques for tasting, and by forming a rich and tightly knit collective, they manage to transcend their inevitably partial knowledge. The judgment of taste produced by wine critics takes the form of a collective, distributed, and ongoing production of the taste of terroir wines.

Extending the Judgment to Wine Lovers, Retailers, Clients, and so on

Clarifications, discussions, and evaluations are crucial for discerning qualitative differences, and their critical assessment also extends to the whole marketing network.

Wine merchant %QE6: It’s not so much that we’re distrustful, but now we want to be more deeply involved. (Wine merchant %QE6, PdL, SBa: 1)

Retailers find it essential to meet with producers, to visit their vineyards and appreciate their engagement with regard to the terroir but also to actually see these terroirs, witness the practices that foster them, and appraise with them the achievements, failures, or the new particularities that seem to appear in their production. In turn, they will communicate information about the vintner’s project to their customers. Very lively, “specialized” networks are set up within which the usual quality signs—the AOCs—are discussed and challenged, be it on the basis of tastes, practices, or reputations.

Wine merchant6: Take, for instance, the generic appellation ‘Bordeaux Supérieur’. You’ll find some extraordinary things and some absolutely … dreadful ones! (Wine merchant6, Paris, AH&SBI: 4)

But they have not been replaced by new quality labels; good practices are as numerous as they are contested, and it is impossible to condense the information into a set of criteria in order to point to the right choices. Everything has to be constantly questioned, debated, and verified.

Wine merchant6: I don’t think you can trust the label because, either it’s insufficiently precise—and in my opinion it’s always insufficiently precise, because for it to be sufficient, it would have to mention all of the winegrower’s methods….

AH: A book per bottle!

Wine merchant6: A book per bottle, yes! (Wine merchant6: Paris, AH&SBI: 4)

Terroir wines matter for all those drinkers who taste, talk about, compare, buy, and drink them, but also for the vintners who have made them, the techniques they have used and the new “terroirs” they originate from. Ultimately, the entire commercial collective deployed around the marketing of these wines contributes to the critique of terroir or wine quality through its interest and depending on the competence bestowed upon it.

Unfinished Terroir?

One could conclude from the provisional character of judgments on terroir taste that wine qualities require a more thorough investigation, more rigorous analytical work from producers and critics to distinguish “their” taste from the wine’s taste, and the impact of techniques and contexts. Only then would it be possible to differentiate first between what belongs to the wine’s taste, to the taster, to techniques, and contexts; and second, to stabilize and delimit the “taste of terroir,” and eventually “terroir” itself. If this more in-depth investigation were to succeed, terroir and its judgment would then appear as a still immature, incomplete, possibly “prescientific” notion. This is what scientists who continue to defend this notion argue (Cadot 2006); according to them, terroir has not yet been made sufficiently explicit and requires further inventory and identification work.

For others, more work is unnecessary. Despite repeated efforts (Bohmrich 1996; Morlat 1998; Fischer and Bauer 2006; White et al. 2007; Saxton 2002; Thelier-Huche and Morlat 2000; Bennett 2007), terroir quality does not easily fit with criteria. The variations observed between one vintage and another can be more significant than geographical variations. Conversely, intraterritory variations may be greater than those observed between different territories. Terroirs are a combination of pedological, climatological, agronomical, wine-growing, and wine-making factors, which scientists are unable to associate with specific terroir qualities, while the list of “variation factors” grows even longer (Deloire et al. 2005; Turner and Creasy 2003) with the introduction of cultivars or vine clones (van Leeuwen et al. 2004) or indigenous microbiological fauna (Renouf et al. 2006), for example.

As they are unable to define—in the sense of delimit—terroir quality with simple presence indicators, scientists still regard the notion as highly questionable (Deloire, Prévost, and Kelly 2008). Actors’ activity with regard to terroir quality is analyzed as “construction” work that makes terroir into a “cultural” artifact (Gade 2009), a “human production” (Berard and Marchenay 2000; Demossier 2000; Crenn and Techoueyres 2007; Gade 2004), and not the expression of a “natural external cause” (van Leeuwen and Seguin 2006).

Scientists who have analyzed it thus suspect that this notion, along with the AOC label, is in fact a self-referential construction without any “objective” referent. The self-limitation that wine growers impose on themselves concerning wine-growing and wine-making practices is under suspicion, as it is difficult to determine the precise effects it has on the taste of wines. Economic research in particular has looked into the claim that terroir could in fact be analyzed as a “social construct” (Gergaud and Ginsburgh 2008; Josling 2006a). From this perspective, terroir is nothing more than the “idea” actors have of it (Josling 2006a; Allaire and Sylvander 1997). Some conclude that terroir only serves as a protectionist barrier, and wine critics who evaluate the quality of AOC wines are parasites of this market (Combris, Lecocq, and Visser 1997; Gergaud and Ginsburgh 2008; Ginsburgh 1995; Shapin 2005). Others continue to promote the notion of “terroir” in the name of other, nongustatory effects resulting from this production method, especially with regard to sustainable development and the “positive side effects” we expect in economic (Bassett, Blanc-Pamard, and Boutrais 2007; Barham 2003) or social (Techoueyres 2007) terms.

For all of them, the diversity of judgments on terroir, along with the repeated failures to list its contributing factors, are signs of a groundless, “false” notion—evaluations of wines do not judge anything as there is no such thing as “terroir” or “terroir quality.” Terroir’s failure to be an “objective notion” has certainly contributed to the fact that despite its success, the AOC quality label has always been, and still is, the object of longstanding and heated debate. Terroir raises issues in terms of intellectual property but also because it is considered unfounded and incapable of differentiating between wine qualities (Addor and Grazioli 2002; Charlier and Ngo 2007; Handler 2006; Josling 2006a; Moschini, Menapace, and Pick 2008).

In the last few years, however, some AOC producers themselves have joined the detractors’ camp, not because they find the notion to be empty or subjective, but because its regulation is, on the contrary, deemed lax and incapable of sufficiently discriminating the wines’ authentic terroir quality. One could interpret this as further “proof” of the vacuity of the notion of terroir, a “mere” economic barrier or distinctive social construction. However, these producers do not dismiss the notion of terroir; on the contrary, they call for a return to terroir. In doing so, they have also allowed social scientists to question and understand how to grasp this notion and evaluate its presence in order to point out what makes it incompatible with the scientific “thinging” of terroir.

If terroir quality does not fit any definition, this may also be due to the fact that both producers and tasters refuse to define it—or claim to be incapable of defining it—according to stricter gustatory or production criteria. For them, each wine and each way of making it brings its own set of revelations about terroir quality, but they cannot be selected in advance. Also, the imposition of gustatory criteria or strict practices would limit the search for terroir and thus risk “red herrings.” “Terroir is a quest,” as they say. It can only be the a posteriori result of a production process. Producers have so far refused to contain terroir within a preexisting definition, but this refusal is less the sign of a groundless notion without referent than that of an object “in the making,” a production.

Can there be an end to this quest? Is there a chance that, one day, they will find terroir and circumscribe its definition? This would also mean the end of their work of interpretation and innovation. The truth of terroir is probably as unattainable as the truth of scientists.

The Impossible Condensation of a Production

“Things” exist independently in the way of Kant’s things-in-themselves. This absolute objectivity—beyond human reach but approached as closely as possible through “descriptions” from which the observer is able to detach and subtract his or herself—is also historically decontextualized, devoid of any process of emergence, and, if need be, already contains its own principles of evolution and transformation.

The critical instrumentation of the proof of terroir presents a very different modality of objects’ existence, not based on the a priori existence of terroir, or on the a priori separation between the object’s taste and the taste of the subject who perceives it. Terroir and its taste are not considered as autonomous and independent “things.” They have no autonomous existence and cannot be divorced from their production process. They are also particular in the sense of not being discrete but distributed products. A bottle of terroir wine is an individual product but only represents a specific facet, or actualization, of terroir; terroir is a collectively articulated production distributed across the range of wines whose pretension to express it has been acknowledged. Similarly, each tasting is a particular production, whereas the collective of those judging terroir taste produce its collective and distributed taste. Even if unique, the object produced is irreducible to a “thing” since the work of discerning all the elements entering into its composition is always done a posteriori, relying on a wine instead of an a priori definition later “applied” to all the results.

As the plural results of a double production distributed across numerous bottles and as many tastings, terroir and its taste cannot be reduced to any “representatives.” The critical separation between vintage, characteristics of the vineyard, engagement of the vintner, and the quality of implemented practices for each wine is always tied to the product or the judgment of taste which it analyzes, or to the producers or tasters who produce it. What makes it possible to compose an “expanded” judgment is the multiplication and articulation of these small, local a posteriori analyses, not the search for general assessment principles applicable a priori to all judgments and all tasters.

Both terroir and its taste escape scientists’ objectivation because they do not bend to its requirements of an a priori differentiation between product, producer, and production techniques. But should we agree with scientists when they conclude that terroir is merely a social construction? We do not think so, because this fails to take into consideration the tests to which every taster puts the wine, or rather, it dismisses them out of hand as so many “false” tests in which the wine itself plays no part.

We propose to refer to the format of object emerging from this plural existence as “product-object”—not unlike Latour’s quasi-objects (2005), or, in a different context, Verran’s territories (1998) and even Gell’s “distributed objects” (2010)—in order to emphasize their irreducible character, as contained in the notion of a “product” inseparable from its process of emerging, and as opposed to the kind of “object-things” which science notably seeks to further define and isolate. A “product-object” can be either a singularity or collectively distributed. The work of an artist often constitutes a single production, more rarely a thing. Works of art are also evaluated by a collective of critics whose judgment is a distributed, collective production. The case of terroir as a distributed production is closer to the notion of art in the sense of the artistic production as a whole, but this difference does not change the essential point that judgment, and thus taste, exist as distributed productions, not things.

Nevertheless, hasty parallels should not be drawn between “product-objects” and (Star and Griesemer 1989) “boundary objects.” These form quite a different notion. They do not point out objects but particular tools allowing the articulation process between all different actualizations of the distributed object.

The “Extensional” Autonomy of Product-Objects

The existence of a thing admits as limit value the absolutely objective knowledge through which it can be described in an absolutely autonomous way. The regime of existence of product-objects also accepts a limit value in which the object can be said to be not autonomous, but “nondependent” from a specific production process. This nondependence is a “generality” achieved not through a distancing of the observer and a standardization of contexts and empirical actualizations of the object, but through the endless multiplication of the variety of observers, means, and contexts of observation. The detachment and isolation from the mediations of scientific objectivity are replaced with their saturation. But just as the objectivity of the thing can always improve without ever being attained, the exhaustion of the variety of elements contributing to the production of an object is also asymptotic. The autonomous object-thing and the independent product-object are both limit conditions.

Both interpretations of objectivity are rendered quite well by the two mathematical ways of describing sets. “Intensional” description translates an unspecified, boundless set into an a priori “property”; this is the kind of description that enables us to evaluate the presence of the color blue in all past and future experiences of this color. Conversely, “extensional” description involves critically listing all elements within a set. The terroir expression is thus represented by the set of all terroir wines, but it leaves the composition of terroir quality a priori undefined. Therefore, a distinction can be made between, on one hand, an “intensional” objectivity aiming—without ever achieving—to reduce phenomena to autonomous things independent from their conditions of production; and, on the other, an “extensional” objectivity attempting to exhaust its variety—again, without ever succeeding. The critical debate surrounding the production and marketing of terroir wines or accompanying those of quality wines can be related to the quest for an extensional objectivity.

The Impossible “Escape” from Criticism

Product-objects do not condense into preexisting things; each new tasting occasion or new vintage remains pregnant with the impressions and new wines that may emerge. However, the body of terroir wines and judgments produced by the collective of critics do not amount to an incommensurable and contradictory juxtaposition of bottles and comments. Neither are they the random and unedited compilation of everything that can be said about, or made into, wine. However diverse and debated judgments about terroir wines may be, individuals who are interested in these wines manage to find a path amidst this ordered variety, linking each wine and each judgment to the way it was produced before proceeding to confront them with their own experience. But such objectifications remain partial and identifiable only a posteriori. Nonetheless, a priori intermediate characterizations as well as elements of description or definition can sometimes emerge. This is the case, for example, with Robert Parker, whose “tastes” have been objectified and named or for certain features of wines or terroirs becoming collectively shared. Occasionally, wine criticism is then capable of generating objects with clearer outlines—a “taste of yellow,” ¹⁰ the “Parker taste” or a “schist terroir”—which begin to resemble “things.” However, this condensation always remains local and never achieves the very aim of critical evaluation, for example, by providing a definition of terroir or a general characterization of wine qualities. ¹¹

Some customers who do not wish to enter this “jungle” of the multiple aspects of terroir wines’ production and evaluation still want to know “which are the good terroir wines.” For this, they rely on strategies for reducing the diversity of judgments and scores, by working out the average of the evaluations published in the various guides or by selecting from the wines that combine the highest number of good scores regardless of the judges. Whatever the technique of calculation, the resulting judgment will not become the “true judgment”; it remains a point of view, a “taste without taste,” as food critic Fernando Point says of the Zagat guide. ¹² Whatever the techniques used or efforts made by tasters to describe themselves as neutral, objective, and impartial, their judgments are always integrated within criticism as a particular feature of the object. There is no perspective “outside” critique; one cannot get rid of the process—here, the taster—through which the judgment is produced. There is, therefore, no possible “observation” of critique, no way of abstracting oneself from the conditions of observation to produce a “representation” of terroir.

Two Incompatible Instrumentations of Proof

Product-objectivity is a “black hole”; it offers no escape from the critical collective from which to contemplate and describe it. Since it never ceases to make itself more explicit, the product-object, whose existence is distributed across a multiplicity of different producers, remains unverifiable and unfalsifiable, to use Popper’s (1959) terms. ¹³ Indeed, in order to test the quality of a wine or its terroir quality, one would have to reduce its evaluation to a trial involving only a limited number of neutral testers in a “representative” time and place. The kind of test that the government asks of terroir producers is, therefore impossible, since it demands representativeness from a distributed collective in which it is fatally lacking and refuses to recognize the object of terroir unless it takes the shape of a thing.

Both thing- and product-objectivities include their own procedures of proof and test. Substituting one for the other (e.g., using a test for a product-object) only seems to lead to a paradox, such as the nonexistence of terroir, just when it appears to interest even more wine lovers. In addition, the objects that submit to either of these modalities of objectivation must sustain these procedures in very different ways: for product-objects, it requires their constant renewal so as to fuel the ongoing work of critique; and for thing-objects, their reduction must end up at a “hard core” without destroying the object itself through excessive reduction.

Mutually Translatable Objectivities?

This alternative objectivity deprives positivist science of its often-claimed monopoly on knowledge. The way actors grasp objects does not necessarily, and by default, constitute an incomplete knowledge at best, and an incorrect one at worst. The collective, extensional “product”-objectivation might bring some consistency back to forms of knowledge declared “nonscientific” or “prescientific.”

Despite the incompatibility of their respective instrumentations of proof, these two forms of objects are not mutually exclusive. There are ways of translating one into the other. By reinterpreting objects as processes, pragmatic sociology carries out the translation of thing-objects into a “product” format. Symmetrically, the endless multiplication of variables in terroir, or their ad hoc selection to account for each case of terroir constitute other, arguably extreme, ways of translating products into things.

These possibilities of mutual translation are limited since it is the very forgetting ¹⁷ that the thing might ever have been a “product” that grants it its power of “immutable mobile” (Latour 1987) and allows it to become a testable object. However, translation is a key resource in order to equip debates on the presence of objects in society because it dissolves the clash between “scientific” and “profane” knowledge, in other words, between scientific ways of “thinging” and other forms of objects’ existence. Interpreting objects as distributed products—understood according to various protocols, by different users, and in different and endlessly renewed circumstances—enables one to restore the plurality of objects and look for local agreements between the different points of views or facets that compose them.

An Anecdotal Objectivity?