[hammock]

In your experience, what makes you so skeptical of terroir? As a naive enthusiast, it makes sense to me that drainage, at the very least, would impact the way the fruits grow , and fruit yield, impacting the final product thusly. A large watermelon and small watermelon from the same vine/garden have different flavor

[lisper]

Yes, I agree that theoretically it kind of makes sense, but I've gathered a lot of data over the years and the best predictor of quality that I've found is the wine maker. We've had it happen a number of times now that a wine that we really liked suddenly started tasting different, and it turned out that the wine maker had changed. So this is a confounding factor. I really like California reds, but mostly from Napa, Sonoma and Paso Robles. Is that because of the terroir? Or the climate? Or the varietals? Or because there's a community of wine makers that all copy each other? It's really hard to tease these apart.