thought experiment. Imagine two vineyards right next to each other.

One, over hundreds of years, has produced acclaimed wine that everybody loves, and sells

for ridiculous prices, hundreds of dollars a bottle. Then you crawl over a fence to the

vineyard right next to it. Might be owned by the same person, maybe growing the same

grapes. Everything's identical the same sun, same rain, same wind except this produces

really mediocre wine that sells to the local café for 50 cents a liter.

Here's the scientific question: Why? I spend a fair bit of time working on this question.

Yes indeed, it does require laboratory experience to evaluate this properly. We tried to have

a lab part of tonight's lecture, but apparently that's not so easy to do in a federal facility,

so you'll have to go home and do the laboratory part as a self study tonight after the lecture.

So I'm going to be addressing this question of "why?" There's actually a technical name

for that called "terroir," which is a French word that's kind of hard to translate.

[banging sounds] OK. Do you know where Hannah went?

Audience Member:  She just went outside. Larry:  I would go outside, too, if I were

her. [laughter]

Audience Member:  [indecipherable 01:51] Larry:  So while they're trying to figure

that out, let me continue the explanation. "Terroir" is a French word that refers to

all of the factors that affect the growing characteristics of grapes. The simplest list of all the things we look at:

climate, soil, geology, culture, all the things that influence the quality of wine.

And what makes this really different from normal food and gardening? Do we have anybody

here who has a garden, who likes to garden? So if you're growing anything tomatoes, cantaloupe,

corn you are probably going to get very rich soil and water and just baby those plants

and try to get them to be as big and as luscious as possible. Grapes for wine production are

almost exactly the opposite. Left to their own devices, the grapes will

overproduce. They'll produce really large grapes if they have unlimited access to water

and nutrients. And they'll be just like those strawberries that you buy at your local supermarket.

They're big, they're luscious, they look great. They just lack one characteristic, that thing

called taste. So if you bought those big strawberries, you always bring them home. I fall for it

every time, especially after a nice, long winter. I see those luscious strawberries.

I go, "Wow! Those look so good!" I bring them home, and I taste them. There's just no taste

there. The same thing will happen with grapes. And

for making fine wine, you really want to get the intense flavors. And to do that, you need

to restrict the vigor of the vines. So the take home message about terroir is that all

of the work we do about siting vineyards and babying these plants into making a wonderful

wine is controlling this natural vigor. And if you're growing the grapes in a climate,

on soils, bedrock and any of the other characteristics I'm going to describe that naturally help

reduce that vigor, then nature is acting as your friend instead of fighting you. So that's

a very simple explanation of what we're going to look at.

I'm going to illustrate this by looking at wines produced in three different parts of

the world Washington state, California, and two regions in France, Bordeaux and Burgundy.

Starting with Washington, we'll look at four factors.

If you look at this list, you'll say, "OK. Climate? I get that. Soils? That makes sense.

Volcanoes and glaciers? I don't see any volcanoes and glaciers in my wine." And so I have to

explain why this is so important, why it directly relates to the quality of the wine.

Let's start at the top with climate. On the left is how the world views the climate of

Washington state. If you think about Seattle or the Olympic rain forest, that is indeed

what it looks like. But on the right is what it's actually like where the grapes are grown,

where the vineyards are situated. And the reason for that huge difference between

those two images or parts of the state of Washington is easily visible on this map if

you're trained to read maps. That is, we have a mountain range, the Cascades, running north/south

right through here. And these are fairly tall mountains. The one that's probably most familiar

to people is Mt. Rainier. If you fly into Seattle on a clear day, which isn't all that

often, you'll fly right next to it. These mountains form a very effective rain

shadow. When people hear that word, they tend to think that this is a physical barrier.

And the moist clouds coming off the Pacific just sort of run into that and stop. They

can't make it past it. That's not what happens at all.

This is simple physics. The air rises up over the top of the mountain. As it the air rises,

it cools. Anybody who's been hiking in the high country knows that it gets cooler as

you go up. And as it gets cooler, the air can hold less moisture, so it rains. It drops

the moisture out. Then when the air goes over the top and back

down, this process reverses. Now the air warms up, but it's already dropped all of its available

moisture when it was going up. So now the air is sinking. It's getting warmer. It can

hold more moisture than it has. So there are places to the east of the Cascades

that not only are true deserts, there's places with negative evapotranspiration, negative

rainfall. It doesn't rain. It actually sucks up moisture from the ground as these hot winds

come down. That's why we have this zone in the middle of the state that forms in the

rain shadow behind the Cascades. This is one of the critical elements for producing fine

wines, being able to control the moisture availability to the grapes.

The other thing that happens with these big mountains is that they are stratovolcanoes,

and periodically they do this. This is Mt. St. Helens in 1980, erupting. And so they're

spewing huge amounts of ash into the air that then can fall back down on the landscape.

So this is a part. Turns out not to be a large part in Washington.

These eruptions are quite large. The ash column will go up vertically until it achieves neutral

buoyancy. It will be swept along by the jet stream. And a really large eruption in about

two weeks will entirely circle the globe. And that's interesting because we have this

ash raining out. It's a very small amount. That means that every place in the globe has

got a little bit of ash from these volcanoes. Next time you're visiting a fine vineyard

in France telling you that it's a wonderful, wonderful wine, you can say, "I taste something

in this wine. It's very familiar to me. It's Washington State!" If you know anything about

French culture you know that, "Ooh, that knife went in, and it's being twisted." I don't

mean to imply that it actually has any effect whatsoever on the taste of the wine, but it

is factually true that volcanic ash from these things is very widespread all over the globe.

The other thing that a trained geologist would see from this map is the effect of glaciers.

For those of you who haven't spent your whole life studying maps, I'll show you what that

is. This is what the world looked like 15,000 years ago. Glacial maximum. All of Canada

was covered by a very large mass of ice. And there were lobes that came down across the

present Canada/US border into the Great Lakes area.

If anybody from New York City, Long Island is the terminal moraine from one of those

big ice sheets. The ice came down, it melted, and it dumped out material, forming Long Island.

Washington State's ice came down into Puget Sound into this area. If you look a little

bit more closely, you can see a big lobe of ice coming in here. Lots of lobes of ice.

And the glaciers are important for two reasons. One, these can transport a huge amount of

material. So if we go to a modern region this is up in Alaska we can see glaciers coming

down the valleys. You can see all the dark material on top of that. That's rock, debris

that has cascaded down the slopes of the mountains onto the top of the glacier. They're being

transported. If we go down to the surface of the glacier,

you can see large rocks like this. This is what geologists do for fun. We ride these

galloping glaciers. They actually move pretty slowly. It's not that difficult.

But what's important about this is that is a very large chunk of rock. The only thing

that can move big chunks of rock like that is glacial ice. Wind can't move it. A river's

not going to be able to move a block that big. So, when we find these big blocks dumped

out onto the ground, even if there's no longer any ice there, it allows us to interpret that

there was ice. So this is the essence of geological reasoning,

of understanding how the processes work to be able to make an observation that if I go

into a vineyard or behind a Wal Mart and I see a big block of rock like that, I know

that the only process that could have gotten that rock there is glacial activity.

The other thing that's really important about these glaciers is they came down from Canada

and they blocked up lots of rivers, lots of different drainages in here. This is an artistic

rendition of what it was like. The one that's probably most important. A

lobe of this glacial ice blocked what is the present day Clark Fork River in Montana, and

it formed a lake behind this big tongue of ice that covered the western half of Montana

to a depth of about 1,000 feet. Sothis is a huge lake. If you're flying to Missoula,

you'll actually see the old beach lines up there on the mountain walls around Missoula.

And just forming a lake by itself wouldn't be of tremendous importance, except for one

little thing. As that lake got deeper and deeper and deeper, held in by this ice dam,

this lobe of ice, more physics. Ice? Water? Ice floats on water!

Eventually when that water got deep enough it caused the catastrophic failure of that

ice dam so that this huge body of water again, covering the western half of Montana suddenly

raced across the state of Washington and drained out. That's what's being illustrated here,

artistically. So it raced across the state of Washington out the channel of the present

day Columbia River, back flooded the Willamette Valley down in Oregon, and swooshed out into

the Pacific. The amount of water that flooded across the

state of Washington and we can calculate that it took somewhere between a week and two weeks

for that water to drain across the state is more than 10 times all the world's rivers

at flood stage simultaneously. Take the Amazon, take the Nile, take the Mississippi,

all the world's rivers, multiply it by 10, that's how much water was racing across the

state of Washington. That water was going very fast, and it had a tremendous impact

on the landscape. We can see this pretty easily with either

airplanes or flying over in a satellite. You can see what looked like river channels here.

These are farm fields. This is a satellite image and this is where the water was flowing.

There’s no rivers in this thing now. This was a very short lived again, one to two week

burst of water flooding across the state of Washington somewhere around 15,000 years ago.

It carved through all of the soil that used to be there. This water is flowing fast enough

it actually carved its way through the bedrock as well, channeling right through it. If we

go down to ground level we can see one of these.

So this dry valley in here, this has a geologic name called a coulee, and you've probably

heard of the biggest one of these in the United States. That's Grand Coulee, and the engineers

used this natural occurrence of this valley to build Grand Coulee Dam, and then they did

what Ma Nature did. They filled it up full of water behind the dam.

That's a farm down there. There's a road. This is a fairly wide valley, and there's

no river in there. This is very unusual. Normally when you have a valley and you have these

steep walls on both sides you'd be seeing some sort of creek or river flowing down the

middle. But there's not, because this, as I go back, is one of these little channels

where the water is flowing across the state. Now why is this important? Because that water

got rid of the soil that used to be there, stripped off a lot of things, mixed this all

up, and I'll show you what it did with it. This is another artistic rendition of what

that flood would have looked like so you can see big chunks of ice coming down along with

it. It's going over a series of breaks in the rocks forming large waterfalls, but there's

no water there anymore. Imagine that you went to Niagara Falls or

Iguaçu down in South America. Somebody just turned off the water, and you're looking at

Niagara Falls without any water. You'd have this big dry waterfall. Well, that's what

this is. There's no water there right now. It's called Dry Falls State Park in Washington

State, and it looks just like Niagara Falls without the water.

And all these things were a real mystery to people for a long time. They just couldn't