Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard (1888). The finest wines have many stories to tell.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Most people think terroir means soil. Others think it means climate. Everyone agrees the concept is French. Everyone is only partly right.
Terroir is the entire relationship between a vine and its environment, including even the animals and people within it. Climate, geology, topography, soil microorganisms, plants and insects, centuries of accumulated know-how, and the choices of the grower and winemaker are only some of the things that contribute to the character of a wine. Terroir is not any one of these things but the interaction between them. The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.
It took humanity thousands of years to arrive at this deceptively simple idea.
The first winemakers, in the South Caucasus some eight thousand years ago, left no written record. But they almost certainly understood that some vineyards produced better wines than others.
What we can be sure of is that, by the time of Homer (eighth century BCE), certain wines had already become famous. In the Odyssey, Odysseus carries the priest Maron’s Ismarian wine, so rich and fragrant that it has to be diluted with twenty parts water—and, even then, fills the room with perfume. Indeed, it is potent enough to bring down the Cyclops Polyphemus. Homer assumes his audience will recognise the wine’s reputation. Long before anyone understood why some places produced extraordinary wines, the Greeks already knew that they did.
In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle’s friend and student Theophrastus asked a new question: why? In his two great botanical works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, he seeks not merely to describe plants but to explain them. ‘There are as many kinds of grapes as there are kinds of soil,’ he observes. It is a simple but revealing remark. For perhaps the first time, someone was looking beyond the reputation of a vineyard and, like Master Aristotle, asking about causes.
The Romans carried the idea further. Virgil famously wrote, Bacchus amat colles—’Bacchus loves the hills’—suggesting that vines do their best on well-drained slopes. Writing in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder argued that when a vine is transplanted, ‘it changes its character so completely owing to the difference of soil and climate that it is never recognised as the same.’ His conclusion is strikingly modern: ‘It is a fact that the soil matters more than the vine.’
Yet the Romans also contributed something even more enduring than practical viticulture. They spoke of the genius loci: the spirit of the place. A great vineyard possessed a character that everyone knew, but no one could fully explain. It was more than its soil, more than its climate, more than the skill of the grower. It had a spirit of its own.
Modern science has transformed our understanding of wine. We can analyse soils, study climates, sequence vine genomes, and measure almost every aspect of a vineyard. Yet in so doing we sometimes forget what the ancients grasped intuitively. A great vineyard, like any balanced ecosystem, is more than the sum of its measurable parts.
As a blind taster, I encounter this truth every time I lift a glass. A Chablis should not taste like a Napa Chardonnay, nor a Mosel Riesling like one from Clare Valley. The finest wines carry unmistakable traces of where they come from—even of the eucalyptus of Coonawarra and the garrigue of Provence. Their place speaks through them.
For this reason, I have never been fond of heavy-handed oak. Oak has its place, and in skilful hands it can add harmony and complexity. But when it overwhelms a wine, it drowns out many of the very signals that blind tasters rely upon and wine lovers cherish. Instead of hearing the voice of the vineyard—the genius loci—we hear only the barrel from another place.
Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of terroir. It is not merely a list of soils, climates, or slopes. It is the elusive way in which a place leaves its signature upon a wine. The highest calling of a winemaker is not to silence that voice, but to listen for it—and let it speak.
Sources: Homer, Odyssey 9.208–211; Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants 3.11 and On the Causes of Plants; Virgil, Georgics 2.113; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 14.4–5, 17.3–8.
Sun, Sex, and Sea: How Aristotle Invented Science on Lesbos
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Article substantially revised on 9 August 2026.
Long before there were laboratories, microscopes, or indeed scientists, Aristotle spent two happy years on the Greek island of Lesbos studying animals. He dissected specimens, questioned fishermen and beekeepers, and observed everything from the mating habits of octopuses to the development of chicks. Some of his conclusions were far off the mark; others would not be confirmed for more than two thousand years. In those two years, Aristotle did not merely invent science and biology. He developed a way of looking at the natural world that would transform his philosophy—and, ultimately, ours.
Aristotle remained at Plato’s Academy for nearly twenty years, only leaving after Plato’s death in 347. The reasons for his departure are unclear: he may have felt slighted at being passed over for the scholarchship of the Academy in favour of Plato’s nephew, Speusippus; or he may have fled, possibly even before Plato’s death, for fear of the growing anti-Macedonian feeling.
In 351, the orator Demosthenes had delivered his First Philippic denouncing Philip II’s imperial ambitions, and in 348, the year before Plato’s death, Philip had razed Athenian ally Olynthus to the ground.
Then in his thirty-seventh year, Aristotle travelled with fellow Platonist Xenocrates of Chalcedon to Assos (in the Troad, Asia Minor) to join the court of Hermias of Atarneus, who had studied at the Academy. Aristotle may or may not have gone to Assos as an ambassador of Philip, who wished to have Hermias for an ally.
In either case, it seems that he exerted a moderating influence on Hermias, who softened his harsh tyrannical rule—enabling him, in short succession, to win over neighbouring peoples and expand his territory.
In 344, Hermias was captured by a mercenary in the service of Artaxerxes III of Persia and tortured for information about the invasion plans of his ally Philip. But Hermias held his silence, his dying words being that he had done nothing shameful or unworthy of philosophy. Aristotle honoured the memory of his perfect friend with a statue at Delphi and a still extant hymn to virtue.
At around this time, he married Hermias’ niece and adoptive daughter, Pythias, who helped him in his work and bore him a daughter, also Pythias.
After the death of Hermias, Aristotle and his student Tyrtamus crossed over to Lesbos to research the flora and fauna of the island and its remarkable lagoon, then known as the Pyrrha lagoon, now known as the Gulf of Kalloni. Tyrtamus went down in history as Theophrastus [‘Divinely-speaking’], the nickname given to him by Aristotle.
Supposedly, the more empirical Theophrastus concentrated on the flora while the more speculative Aristotle concentrated on the fauna, so that the one is remembered as the father of botany and the other as the father of zoology. In fact, Theophrastus also wrote on animals, and Aristotle on plants, but these works have been lost, as have almost all of Theophrastus’ wide-ranging works.
Lesbos and the inland Gulf of Kalloni (left of the picture)
Aristotle’s Biological Works
Aristotle’s biological works constitute the first systematic study of the living world and, in many respects, the beginning of science as we know it. These works are usually ignored, though they make up a quarter of his extant corpus, and were revered by naturalists such as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin—who, in the year of his death, 1882, wrote to William Ogle that ‘although Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods … they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.’
Although Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods … they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle. —Charles Darwin
Aristotle accompanied his History of Animals (a somewhat misleading title, cf. ‘natural history’) with a now lost book of anatomical drawings. His other biological writings are the Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals, and Generation of Animals, as well as On the Soul and seven shorter works collectively known as the Parva Naturalia.
On the Soul may seem out of place, until one remembers that the very word ‘animal’ [anima] means ‘having breath’ or ‘having soul’. The soul, says Aristotle, is the principle of life, and the knowledge of it contributes greatly to our understanding of nature and truth in general. On the Soul includes a detailed discussion of the senses and established our notion of the ‘five senses’, with Aristotle explicitly stating that ‘there is no sixth sense in addition to the five enumerated’.
In his biological works, Aristotle outlines more than five hundred species, some in more detail than others. He describes the chambered stomachs of ruminants, the social organization of bees, and the embryological development of a chick. He notices that some sharks are viviparous, and that whales and dolphins differ from other fish in breathing air and suckling their young. He infers that brood size decreases with body mass, whereas gestation period and overall lifespan increase.
In a playful by-the-way, he remarks that ‘after drinking wine, the Indian parrot becomes more saucy than ever’.
For centuries, some of Aristotle’s accounts seemed too fanciful to be true, for instance, that the young of a dogfish grow inside their mother’s body, that the male of the river catfish guards the eggs for forty or fifty days after the female has left, or that male octopuses have a sperm-transferring tentacle that sometimes snaps off during mating. Each of these wonders of the world had to wait until the nineteenth century to be confirmed.
Unlike Plato, Aristotle privileged observation over speculation. Like our scientists, he began with a careful gathering of data, from which he attempted to infer explanations and make predictions. He carried out dissections and even rudimentary experiments such as cutting out the heart of a turtle to discover that it could still move its limbs for a surprisingly long time.
However, he did not carry out anything like modern case-control studies, and relied uncritically on the lay testimony of beekeepers, fishermen, travellers, and the like. His lack of rigour led to some embarrassing errors, such as the claim that lions copulate back-to-back, while bears adopt the missionary position and hedgehogs stand on their hind legs to face each other. Or the claim that the female of several species has fewer teeth than the male.
Among these species, he included humans, when he could simply have looked into Pythias’ mouth (wife or daughter).
Biology as Philosophy
Aristotle was not simply doing biology for the sake of biology, but for the sake of philosophy. Like Plato, he was searching for universals, but this time from the ground up. ‘We should,’ he said, ‘venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.’
An animal gives birth to the same animal because of its form [eidos] or ordering pattern—an idea that resonates with modern genetics. The male supplies the form, which is also the soul, in his semen, while the female provides the material in her menses. When the semen meets the menses, they congeal into an egg or embryo ‘like fig juice which curdles milk’. If the semen fails to ‘master the menses’, a female is born.
The soul is not superadded or even supervenient, but corresponds to the animal’s ordering pattern and dynamic processes. Aristotle’s interest in biology informs his theory of the form, which in turn informs his entire physics and metaphysics.
All beings, from minerals to plants and animals, have a form, the potential of which determines their position on the eleven-rung scala naturae, or great chain of being. The Church adapted the concept of a great chain of being, which later helped to justify slavery, colonization, and evangelization. Plants have a vegetative soul, capable of growth and reproduction. Animals, as well as a vegetative soul, have a sensitive soul, capable of sensation and movement, and hence of desire and imagination.
Humans, uniquely, also have a rational soul, capable of thought and reflection. Contra Plato, the soul inheres in the organism, and dies with it—except for the rational soul, which, being a part of God, is immortal. Thought cannot die, since, unlike all else, it is not the function of a particular organ—the brain and the lungs being, in Aristotle’s view, mere radiators for the heart, which is the site of the internal fire and the seat of intelligence, motion, and sensation.
Although he held that all beings have a form, and that the form is injected by the male (a male being defined as ‘an animal that breeds inside another’), Aristotle also believed that many lower animals spontaneously generate: that eels grow out of mud, and insect maggots from putrefying flesh, even though Homer had said otherwise—when, in Iliad XIX, Achilles fears that flies will ‘breed worms’ in the corpse of Patroclus.
To be fair to Aristotle, he had observed that eels have no gonads, and could hardly have guessed that they only develop them in the course of their epic migration to the Sargasso Sea. The earliest challenge to spontaneous generation came as late as 1668, when Francesco Redi covered jars of rotting flesh with gauze and found that only the controls, that is, the uncovered jars, grew maggots.
Aristotle was not a Darwinist nor even a creationist, but an eternalist who believed that the plants and animals before him had always existed and would always exist. One argument that he gives for eternalism is that, if motion had a beginning, this beginning must itself have resulted from a movement, which is a paradox.
Although he privileged observation over theory, his eternalism, albeit logically held, blinded him to the significance of the petrified forest of Lesbos, which would have confronted him with fossilized trees from millions of years ago.
Such are the main lines of Aristotle’s biology and associated philosophy. Many of his inferences have not stood the test of time. Salacious animals do not age more quickly than continent ones. Hair is not grown at the expense of semen, even if women and eunuchs don’t grow bald. And it is not because they lack fatness that bloodless animals are shorter lived than sanguineous ones.
But was the beginning of science not bound to look like this? And is it not remarkable that we today can still read its record?
Aristotle spent no more than two years on Lesbos. In 343, King Philip commissioned him to tutor his son Alexander, who was then around thirteen years old, promising in return to rebuild his native Stageira and repatriate its former citizens.
Aristotle would go on to teach the future conqueror of the known world, but on Lesbos he had begun conquering another world altogether: the hidden world beneath his feet.
How the Son of a Court Physician Became the Most Influential Philosopher in History
In Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–1511), Plato holds his Timaeus and points towards the heavens; Aristotle holds his Ethics and gestures towards the world before him.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Few people have shaped the world as profoundly as Aristotle. Yet, for all his influence, surprisingly little is known about the man himself. As one historian remarked, all that can be said with certainty is that ‘the man was born, worked, and then died’. Even so, the surviving fragments reveal an extraordinary life, which transformed the son of a provincial court physician into the most influential philosopher in the West.
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stageira, on the Chalcidice peninsula of north-eastern Greece. In 348, Philip II of Macedon occupied and destroyed the city, but then had it rebuilt and repopulated in honour of Aristotle, who had been his childhood friend and whom he had appointed to tutor his son, Alexander, the future King of the Oikouménē, or Known World.
The Stagirite’s father, Nicomachus, served as physician to Philip’s father, Amyntas III of Macedon, and descended, purportedly, from the god of medicine, Asclepius—as did his mother, Phæstis. With the healing arts running so thickly in his blood, Aristotle would have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. Certainly, his medical background, and the empiricism of physicians such as Hippocrates, informed his method and philosophy.
Aristotle had a brother and sister, and was probably the youngest of the three siblings. At about the age of thirteen, he lost both his parents and became the ward of Proxenus of Atarneus (in Æolis, Asia Minor), who rounded whatever medical training he had received from his late father. Proxenus married Aristotle’s sister, Arimneste. Together, they had a daughter, Hero, and a son, Nicanor. Hero in turn had a son, the historian Callisthenes of Olynthus, great nephew to Aristotle.
Plato’s Most Brilliant Student
In 367, Proxenus sent the seventeen-year-old Aristotle to study at Plato’s Academy, which had by then become a pre-eminent centre of learning. If Diogenes Laertius is to be believed, the grown-up Aristotle had small eyes and slender calves, dressed fashionably, and spoke with a lisp.
Aristotle remained at the Academy for nearly twenty years, only leaving after Plato’s death in 347. The reasons for his departure are unclear: he may have felt slighted at being passed over for the scholarchship of the Academy in favour of Plato’s nephew, Speussipus; or he may have fled, possibly even before Plato’s death, for fear of the growing anti-Macedonian feeling. In 351, the orator Demosthenes had delivered his First Philippic denouncing Philip II’s imperial ambitions, and in 348, the year before Plato’s death, Philip had razed Athenian ally Olynthus to the ground.
Twenty years at the Academy convinced Aristotle not only of philosophy’s power, but also of its limits. Where Plato sought truth by looking beyond the visible world, Aristotle increasingly sought it within it.
The Philosopher and the Tyrant
Then in his thirty-seventh year, Aristotle travelled with fellow Platonist Xenocrates of Chalcedon to Assos (in the Troad, Asia Minor) to join the court of Hermias of Atarneus, who had studied at the Academy. Aristotle may or may not have gone to Assos as an ambassador of Philip, who wished to have Hermias for an ally. In either case, it seems that he exerted a moderating influence on Hermias, who softened his harsh tyrannical rule—enabling him, in short succession, to win over neighbouring peoples and expand his territory.
In 344, Hermias was captured by a mercenary in the service of Artaxerxes III of Persia and tortured for information about the invasion plans of his ally Philip. But Hermias held his silence, his dying words being that he had done nothing shameful or unworthy of philosophy. Aristotle honoured the memory of his perfect friend with a statue at Delphi and a still extant hymn to virtue.
At around this time, he married Hermias’ niece and adoptive daughter, Pythias, who helped him in his work and bore him a daughter, also Pythias.
Paradise on Lesbos
After the death of Hermias, Aristotle and his student Tyrtamus crossed over to Lesbos to research the flora and fauna of the island and its remarkable lagoon, then known as the Pyrrha lagoon, now known as the Gulf of Kalloni.
Tyrtamus went down in history as Theophrastus [‘Divinely-speaking’], the nickname given to him by Aristotle. Supposedly, the more empirical Theophrastus concentrated on the flora while the more speculative Aristotle concentrated on the fauna, so that the one is remembered as the father of botany and the other as the father of zoology. In fact, Theophrastus also wrote on animals, and Aristotle on plants, but these works have been lost, as have almost all of Theophrastus’ wide-ranging works.
Aristotle was not simply doing biology for the sake of biology, but for the sake of philosophy. Like Plato, he was searching for universals, but this time from the ground up. ‘We should’ he said, ‘venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.’
Teaching Alexander
Aristotle spent no more than two years on Lesbos.
In 343, King Philip commissioned him to tutor his son Alexander, who was then around thirteen years old, promising in return to rebuild his native Stageira and repatriate its former citizens. In the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza, near the Macedonian capital of Pela, Aristotle taught not only Alexander but also his close friend or lover Hephæstion, and two other future rulers, Ptolemy and Cassander.
It is said that Aristotle prepared for Alexander an annotated copy of the Iliad, which inspired the prince to model his life on that of the demy-divine Achilles. Even if the story is invented, Aristotle’s influence over Alexander is indicated by the crowd of zoologists and botanists that accompanied him on his Eastern conquests, and by the official chronicler of these conquests, who was none other than Aristotle’s great nephew, Callisthenes of Olynthus.
According to both Plutarch and Aulus Gellius, upon hearing that Aristotle had published some of his teachings, Alexander wrote to him from Asia:
Alexander to Aristotle, greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been instructed in be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell.
Later, as pharaoh in Egypt, Ptolemy built the Great Library of Alexandria, turning the city, which had been founded by Alexander, into a major centre of learning. Alexander, and Ptolemy after him, did much to disseminate Greek culture, so that three centuries later Greek seemed like the natural choice of language for the New Testament.
Aristotle’s Great Project: Organising All Human Knowledge
In around 339, Speussipus suffered a stroke and died, and Xenocrates became the third scholarch of the Academy, with Aristotle passed over for a second time. Among those who frequented the lectures of Xenocrates at the Academy were Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school, and Epicurus of Samos, founder of the Epicurean school.
In 334, Aristotle, now returned to Athens, established his own school in a public exercise and training ground dedicated to the god Apollo Lyceus [‘Apollo the Wolf-god’], whence its name, the Lyceum. A temple had once stood on the expansive site, which in Aristotle’s time had different areas dedicated to different purposes. Both Socrates and Plato had spoken or taught there, to the extent that the Lyceum is the setting of Plato’s Euthydemus, which features Socrates and Cleinias, the grandson of Alcibiades, in conversation with Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, a pair of moronic brothers and sophists.
Aristotle taught in the morning, and in the afternoon would sometimes give a public lecture. He often did his thinking and teaching while walking along the Lyceum’s shaded paths, or peripatoi, so that his students, who doubled up as his colleagues and researchers, came to be known as the peripatetics.
Over the next twelve years, Aristotle wrote many of his works and collected the West’s first great library, including copies of the constitutions of 158 cities. He also developed the world’s first botanical garden and zoological park from the plant and animal specimens that Alexander kept returning from the East.
After the death of his wife Pythias, he became involved with Herpyllis of Stageira, who bore him a son whom he named Nicomachus after his father. To this son, he dedicated his major work of ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics. According to the Suda, he also had an eromenos [younger male lover], the historian Palæphatus of Abydus.
Aristotle’s school lived or limped on until 86 BCE, when Athens was sacked by Sulla, the only man in history to have occupied both Athens and Rome. According to Plutarch, Sulla felled the ancient planes of the Academy and Lyceum to build siege engines. In antiquity, the Lyceum had stood to the east of the city wall. In 1996, its remains were uncovered in a park behind the Hellenic Parliament, while clearing space for the new Museum of Modern Art.
Exile and Death
In the East, Callisthenes had become increasingly critical of Alexander’s adoption of Persian customs, especially those, such as proskynesis (falling down before the king and kissing the ground or his feet), which fed into his mounting megalomania.
When a former pupil implicated Callisthenes in a regicidal plot, Alexander left Aristotle’s great nephew to perish in prison. According to Diogenes Laertius, Callisthenes was ‘confined in an iron cage and carried about until he became infested with vermin through lack of proper attention; and finally he was thrown to a lion and so met his end.’ The death of his great nephew soured Aristotle’s relationship with Alexander, and prompted Theophrastus to write a treatise on grief, the now lost Callisthenes.
Even so, Aristotle’s long-time association with Alexander had led the Athenians to perceive him as Macedonian. After Alexander’s death in Babylon in 323, anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens flared up, and Demophilius and Eurymedon the Hierophant charged Aristotle with impiety, possibly for praying to his late friend Hermias rather than anything in the Physics or Metaphysics. Aristotle fled to the solitude, or loneliness, of his country house at Chalcis in Eubœa, an island off the Attic coast and the homeland of his mother’s family. Referencing the trial and execution of Socrates, he explained, ‘I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.’
In the event, Aristotle died within the year, in 322, aged sixty-two, possibly from an abdominal condition. Theophrastus, who was not Macedonian but Lesbian, had remained in Athens as scholarch of the peripatetic school. In his will, Aristotle named him as his successor and bequeathed him his works and library. On the family side, he left a furnished house, three female slaves, and a talent of silver to his wife or concubine Herpyllis, and appointed his nephew Nicanor as guardian to the still young Nicomachus. Nicomachus became a pupil of Theophrastus and, according to Aristippus, his eromenos. He died in battle while still young.
Theophrastus inherited not only Aristotle’s school but also the intellectual legacy of the man who, for centuries to come, would simply be known as ‘The Philosopher’.
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