Podcast: Garden Confidential

Episode 13: Sense of Place

Leaf of a Syrah grape (Vitis vinifera cultivar). Play this podcast.

The French have a word, terroir, that loosely translates to “sense of place,” and it’s a term that’s usually used to describe all the cultural factors that make an agricultural crop what it is–climate, soil, things like that.

Terroir is a word that gets batted around when experts discuss food crops and coffee, but you’re most likely to hear it in reference to wine.

In this episode of Garden Confidential, we take it a step further and investigate all the factors that play into sense of place, how they affect the plants in your garden–and, ultimately, how they affect you. In the first segment, I talk to Jeff McBride, vice president of winemaking at Benziger Family Winery in Sonoma County, California, about how terroir affects this most place-sensitive product. Then I chat with author Margaret Roach about how she came to learn about her own garden’s sense of place, how it affected her, and her new book, The Backyard Parables. Tune in for more.

Links mentioned in this podcast…

Margaret Roach
Benziger Family Winery

Music from this podcast by Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) and ccMixter user Gurdonark.

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