Variability and Change

This article examines how central Ohio winegrowers are able to manufacture “the taste of place” in the midst of a dominant global discourse that maintains a rhetoric of anthropogenic climate change. Importantly, this work positions climate as not necessarily changing but rather as seemingly always being in a state of change. While relatively few winegrowers in central Ohio have been growing grapes and making wine for a few decades, many more are relatively new to the artisanal and industrial wine landscape, which includes added pressures beyond climate (such as changes in the global market or legislation) that influence decision-making and ongoing landscape transformations. Drawing on interviews and participant observations conducted in central Ohio, as well as in Alsace, eastern France, this article argues that constant adaptations to multiple terroir contexts are liminal acts that illustrate how terroir is being “reverse engineered” (i.e., in a constant state of being made or even conceptualized a posteriori) in a region that is facing social and ecological change.