"SOME call it magic. Others say it's romance or simply a hyperactive imagination. But wine, unlike any other beverage, has the special power of summoning up a precise corner of the world with every sip. Whether the rolling hills and valleys of Piedmont in a glass of Barolo, the vineyards slanting toward the Rhine at hysterically steep angles in a good Rheingau or pastoral Mendocino County in a dry, minerally gewürztraminer from the Anderson Valley, pictures and places waft up from wine like the proverbial aromas of fruits and earth.

This is terroir, the mystical sense of place that so enchants wine lovers and bedevils those literal-minded types who question how anybody can taste a place. When I hear people deny the existence of terroir, I think of those books of drawings that turn three-dimensional as you gaze at them. Some people can lose themselves in the complexity of the images; for others the pages remain flat no matter how hard they stare."