All wine starts as water in the soil. The vine reaches for it and for essential nutrients in poor soil, by stretching its roots both deep and wide.

The vine is a plant which requires a poor soil consisting mainly of gravel and sand. The variance of such soils gives rise to not only many varieties of grapes prevailing within a given area, but to the qualities and flavours of the wines produced from them.

Stoney soils allow water to permeate the ground to a great depth, this encourages the vine to grow deep roots.

A typical terroir from the Medoc will be covered in surface pebbles up to 30cm deep, and often stained blue with copper sulphate sprayed to prevent infection and fungi. The vine has few roots in this surface layer.

Under the pebbles is a layer of marl introduced by hand over many years. The vine will have rootlets to extract the nutrients in this layer. Below this layer is a stratified mixture of sand and organic material from which the vine extracts further nutrition.

Around 1.2m the sand becomes more compacted and carries perpetual pockets of moisture the vine requires for survival in hot weather.

The vine requires a large area of soil from which to extract water and nutrients. It is often found that halving the number of vines in the same volume of soil still produces the same overall harvest for the vineyard.

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