What are we brewing coffee for?

Last week I was reading the Dining & Wine section of the New York Times. There was a wine article about Barbera wines written by Eric Asimov.

While I enjoyed the entire article, one phrase really stuck in my head.  He described a wine as “an easy-to-swallow lesson in how wine could be both pleasurable and thought-provoking, while performing its basic function of making food taste better.” (italics mine).

It became one of those “aha” moments. Of course wine was made to go with food.  This is in fact one of the major handicaps for New World wines as they strive for terroir.

We in the New World seem to think of terroir as a purely physical thing (the land produces differences in flavor, thus we have terroir); however, it’s much more than that, it’s about producing something – in this case a wine – that comes from a place, which has land, people, cuisine, traditions, etc. This is the context in which wine has terroir, somebody in a certain place, at a certain time, with a certain culture made it and thus is fits in their story… it comes from somewhere.

With this tangent in mind, I got thinking about the coffee I was sipping while reading the article, does it have terroir?  For what purpose was it made? From where did it come? Was it made to go with something (like food)? If so, what? It seems to me that various brewing processes (espresso and the Ethiopian coffee ceremony) could be said to have terroir, but could the same be said of various origins?

Specialty Coffee has really come of age in a global culture, where technology has meant less limitations and isolation, which were the driving forces behind local culture in past. In a time where distances are quickly shrinking, are we also losing the ability to create things with terroir?

More than simply globalization leading to homogenization can a product produced essentially by the Third World for the First World really be said to rise to the level of having a sense of place (unless that place is the market)?

Old World wines were originally made for the local populations and then shared with the wider world. But many coffee farmers have never even tasted their final product, let alone producing coffee for their local region with a local culture.

It seems to me terroir is a concept that asks much more from us than simply tasting coffee from various regions; it’s about going deeper not broader.