Just a tip for your friend... to experience California terroir pick up a few bottles of Pax Cellars Syrah from Alder Springs. All four blocks. The Knob is my favorite but the differences between blocks is interesting.

For extra credit there are some 120 year old vines of Zinfandel to try from other producers who can demonstrate what California can produce.

Yes, there IS terroir in California. And I don't live there.

Cheers!

There is a book on the subject that I found informative if anyone is interested (possible overarching irrelevance notwithstanding): Matt Kramer's New California Wine.

I seem to have misplaced my copy of Kramer's Making Sense of California Wine, but he does discuss California terroir (or more often its absence). Among other things, I believe he claims that Chalk Hill is on (whitish) volcanic soil, not chalk.

Two wineries in the Napa Valley right off the top:
Stony Hill on Spring Mountain, who are making wine pretty well much the way they have been for decades. To me, their wine captures that sense of territoriality.

Another interesting winery, Nickel & Nickel, makes single vineyard, single varietal wines.

Head winemaker Dirk Hampson writes his blog from there called, Terroir, Dirty talk about wine:
http://www.nickelandnickel.com/weblog.html

Check them out....but remember, California isn't France and it isn't Italy (and it isn't New York). It has its own sense of place, whether one sees it or not, or likes it or not.

The existence Californian terroir is not really the question, is it? I think most people believe that where a grape grows has some influence on the wine in the bottle. It seems that there are really two issues; awareness and emphasis. Wine making regions with long histories have seen the effect of weather, winemakers, religion, governments etc. on the wine from a particular vineyard. Over time, people come to know that a very important factor in what makes a particular bottle of wine the way it should be is the place where the grapes grew. They also learn what is unique and special about certain regions and vineyards. It takes a wine drinking culture time to develop this knowledge. In the New World, not just California, there simply hasn’t been that much experience with most of the vineyard sites. So, I do not think the Californian wine community has a handle on terroir like they might have in parts of Europe. It is difficult to put something into a wine that you do not understand.

Which leads to the question of how much time and effort can a winemaker put into realizing the terroir of the grapes he/she are using? For large operations, they probably also ask “How many of the people that buy our wine would know or could tell the difference?” Given that we do not have a real understanding of the terroir we think we are pursuing, how do we gain this knowledge? It seems to me that most small operations are already doing what winemakers have always done to learn about terroir, they are making the best wine they can. This is the same way other wine growing regions learned about their vineyards and their terroir. Some large Californian wineries, like some large European cooperatives, are not making the best wine possible from the grapes they have. When companies do this, they are not learning about the land nor are they working in the best interest of the wine community. Bland mass produced wine doesn’t taste good nor does it teach us about the land it came from. Some of these companie will slow the progress toward understanding the terroir of California, but they cannot stop it. The longer we make wine in the same places, the more we will all learn about the terroir of each vineyard and how it should taste in a glass.

I love it that on the day I buy my first ticket to visit California, I read this on Alice Feiring's blog. An auspicious sign for my trip and more importantly, a call to arms for California wine (thank god we've moved on from the Long Island hoo-ha). Paso, I'll be taking secretly observing if you've taken notes.

Alice:

For those of us still seeking analog wines in a digital world, this "revelation" courtesy of the L.A. Times that California reds are "packing more punch."
Sigh....

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-redwines27feb27,1,4880759.story?ctrack=2&cset=true

I wasn't aware of the fact that people were refuting terroir until I did a google search of "terroir" and "placebo effect". Personally, I'd liken the existence of california terroir to that of the wooly mammoths rather than bigfoot....

I think the issue is more about intrusive winemaking, not a lack of terrior. The terrior of CA wines are there.... unfortunately, the public is more interested in high alcohol and rs.

Fabulous 2 hours listening to Wells Guthrie from Copain yesterday... he brought in some Pinot at 22.8 brix and the other guys in his crush facility were floored that he was bringing it in to make red wine, not rose.... He feels that using super-yeasts, misguided planting of Burgundy clones in California, and so on, have served to make wines that are so fruity and alcoholic that terroir is completely masked. He's picking at lower brix, seeking out unique sites, and making wines using stems, less and less new oak, wild yeasts (and he said that coming from organic vineyards, his wines fermented fine last year in a brand new winery -- he bought some yeast just in case his fermentations didn't start but never used it. The conventional wisdom that the yeast is in the winery, not the vineyard, turns out not to be true if your vineyard hasn't had the crap sprayed out of it it....). Anyhow it all gave me hope in spades for the way being found by a few brave intelligent people.

Well, the first thing to know is that California is almost entirely bereft of limestone, Paso being somewhat of an exception. So immediately we know that CA wines cannot resemble Vouvray, Burgundy, Gigondas.

The second thing to know is that CA's coastal ranges are largely "the amassed detritus of several geologies... [the ranges] have no integral structure. They are a fragmentary mass, a marine clutter," to quote from John McPhee's Assembling California. There's also some isolated erupted volcanic products -- in Napa but not Sonoma, for example.

See also this interesting interview with soil scientist Tom Rice.
http://wine.appellationamerica.com/wine-review/261/Investigating-Soil-Paso-Robles.html

Given California's enormously complex soils and mesoclimates, why then do so many taste so samey? Are they all using the same industrial yeast or something?

If you dig purity and nerve and depth and beauty (and you do) then definitely check out Renaissance wines, which are the best I've had from California. From the Sierra Foothills. Thin granitic soils, high altitude, natural yeasts, organic farming, the whole shebang. Their 2002 Syrah killed me and will be long-lived.

There is no reason why great wines can't be grown in the sandstones, fractured shales, basalt, and tuff of California's coastal range. Granite and limestone are not the end-all of vine soil parent material, they are merely different. This speaks to the truth behind terroir - the differences are the fun part. I find the John McPhee quote silly, and rather snobbish frankly.

Stefen, why is the McPhee quote silly and snobbish? To me it illustrates that California's geology is incredibly complex and interesting. There's so much to know, and I think you'd practically have to go vineyard to vineyard to begin to know anything about the soil composition.

And nowhere did I say that granite and limestone are the end-all. Obviously alluvial clay, gravel, schist, slate, sand, sandstone, and volcanics of all kinds (by no means is this a complete list) have proven to be great soils for wine all over the world. But with limestone being key in several French regions, a French person might want to know that you mostly won't find it in California.

The differences ARE the fun part, completely agree. Which is why, knowing there's an incredibly diverse array of soils and climates, and knowing that greatness is possible in so much of California, I'm frustrated by the mediocre sameyness of too many California wines. I've smelled high-end Paso cabs that smell EXACTLY like high-end Napa cabs, and taste like pancake compote to boot. I wonder if a common strain of industrial yeast helps make this so (a la bananas in the Beaujolais), along with the terroir-obliterating factors of overripening and overextraction.