For the past few weeks I have been drinking a delicious coffee from Colombia. Each sip of this filter coffee reminds me of the unrelenting efforts involved in achieving this cup. It has an unmistakable full body and crisp acidity, and every sip takes me straight back to the land, but the scene in front of me is worlds away. I have an emotional connection to this coffee, but the consumers near me enjoying their lattes and cold brews in the spring sunshine do not. Their value isn’t tied to the flavours of a geographic location, but to the coffee’s stimulating properties.

Why is this? Most consumers don’t have a discerning relationship with coffee like they do with wine. They will walk into a local bottle shop and have some idea of what different varietals of grape will taste like, or even prefer one regional Australian wine over another, such as Clare Valley over the Barossa, or the Hunter Valley over Margaret River. The may even know what variety these regions are famous for.

WHAT IS TERROIR?

The  flavours of an agricultural product are the consequence of climate, altitude, and soil.

Some Western producers label this combination as “taste of place”, but the French call it “terroir”. To them, it means more than just the flavours of the land, but a concept that’s fundamental to food culture. The pleasure from these flavours signifies a desirable, valuable good, not a disposable commodity. In order to preserve provincial  flavours, the French government invested in a certification called the Appellation d’origine contrôlée. For its wine, producers must respect regional constraints of certain varietals and follow specific processing methods in order to attain this certification. This creates a signature  flavour of a region, preserves tradition, maintains quality standards, and creates a value around a product that is directly linked to its place of origin.

Mike Eggert, Chef and Partner of Pinbone in Sydney, says consumers need to appreciate that terroir is the “diary of a farmer”.

“It’s an honest, unedited, uncensored expression of what [farmers] have lived through for the last week, month, season, or year, and it’s delivered to the consumer through sight, smell, touch, sound, and taste,” 

Mike says,

“I personally don’t think you can call something terroir if you manipulate or alter it from its natural state. To truly experience and express terroir, you must have a hands-off approach. Agriculture that uses aquaculture to substitute rainfall, herbicides and pesticides, or fertilisers, is creating a false economy and anything taken and shown from that earth is so far from terroir, it’s more like Ikea.”

Coffee producer Miguel Fajardo Mendoza from Raw Material Colombia describes terroir as the place he grows his coffee: the altitude, the microclimate, and the soil.

“These three variables, along with shade, help develop any kind of flavours from the land into the cup,” he says. 

Miguel notes that the post-harvest process is crucial to showcasing these three terroir attributes in the cup and that bad post-harvest management could ruin all the flavour attributed to terroir. He adds that Colombia’s coffee farming history is crucial to the region’s successful production it shares today. 

“Fifty years ago, coffee was planted under shade and no chemical herbicides were used. This meant significant micro- organism activity in the soil, and a layer of mulch to provide the needed humidity for this to happen,” Miguel says. “To respect terroir, quality producers need to embed the micro and macro elements into the coffee cherry by farming at higher elevation and in cooler climates in order for coffee cherries to develop slowly - this is what helps fix all of these elements into the seed.” 

THE PROBLEM WITH PRODUCTION

Promoting terroir has been successful in many food industries including French wine and cheese and Canadian maple syrup. However, there is a general problem agriculture faces: we have a vast and growing population, and we need to be fed. The risk of a seasonal low, or the plight of pests and disease, can be hard on farmers to say the least. A by-product of large scale, mono- varietal farming, which can rely heavily on irrigation, pesticides, and fungicides to guarantee crop success, is that our sensory experience of a carrot or an apple becomes limited. Everything tastes the same. This leads to consumers associating fruit and vegetables with a consistent flavour, and when presented with something that’s slightly blemished, or varying from this flavour, we reject it. 

When I asked Mike Eggert what this means for a chef, he says the line is blurred for the worse when people decide that natural elements or free-living growing organisms should conform to consistency. 

“It is the chef’s job to make each dish taste great and look great. This is not a job for the farmers,” he says. “Unlike the farmers, chefs aren’t experiencing the highs and lows of the flavour and seasonal spectrum, or challenged by divine yet imperfect food, and neither are the consumers.” 

Mike says there is unfortunately a lack of farmers within the Sydney area who grow with “true terroir” in mind, who live and ride the seasons, and grow what they want, and not what consumers want. 

“If the demand for baby carrots and micro greens pays the bills, then I say plant and sell them,” he says. “But if they aren’t free to plant for the season and mix up their crops, then they can also never show you some ups and downs or blow you away with seasonal greats. I get 99 per cent of my fruit and vegetables from Flemington and it’s basically the same all year. It’s good but it’s really never great, that’s the difference between Australia and Europe. We get 80 per cent delicious fruit or vegetables, like strawberries, 100 per cent of the year. [Europe] gets 100 percent delicious strawberries, 25 per cent of the year.” 

RESPECTING TERROIR 

In specialty coffee markets there are demands for a certain quality of flavour. Terroir is important, but there are particular varietals achieving “rock star status” and exceptionally high prices. Manycoffee producers are planting these types of varietals in conditions they weren’t meant to. 

Producer Miguel says “growing rare varietals is hard and expensive. Not many farmers understand that such varietals only flourish with adequate care and treatment, and are not an automatic success. “I believe you can plant and achieve great results if you understand the risks and the market. I see a lot of Colombian coffee growers planting varietals such as Geisha, Pacamara, Wush Wush, but they do this in lower altitudes without shade, and think that because they planted this rare varietal, they are going to get US$30 per kilogram,” Miguel says. “If you respect terroir, an average varietal such as Castillo can taste better than a Geisha that hasn’t been tended to appropriately. The terroir that suits each type of coffee for me depends on those variables. For example, I wouldn’t plant a Geisha below 1600 metres above sea level with no shade. I would plant a Tabi varietal below this with no shade and won’t have any issues.” 

Working with nature is always risky business. Coffee, in many ways, is a long way behind other agricultural practices in mitigating this risk. Arabica is being challenged by climate change. Shifting weather patterns and temperatures bring pests, fungus, and disease that thrive in the varying conditions. Developing and planting more resistant hybrids helps to an extent, but this takes time. Another constraint is the lack of genetic diversity of Arabica coffee. A recent study by World Coffee Research put the diversity at 1.2 per cent genetic variance between varieties, and only 0.5 per cent from the commonly grown varieties. This greatly reduces the species’ immunity to disease. 

With the Arabica genome recently sequenced in early 2017, we can only now look at specific coffee breeding for disease resistance while hopefully maintaining quality of flavour. Well, that is so long as that demand for a specialty market exists. 

WHAT WILL WE VALUE IN THE END?

Will terroir in coffee be valued by the masses, like wine? Purveyors of specialty coffee in Australia are certainly trying to promote this. We are slowly seeing a trend in Sydney and Melbourne of consumers drinking more filter coffee from in-season specialty single origins. 

Will terroir still exist in generations to come? Or will we continue to manufacture flavour because it will sell?