Unexpected Notes from a Vineyard
One of the things I’ve been trying to attune myself to lately is asking, “What wants to happen?” I received a powerful lesson in that on a recent visit to a vineyard in Vouvray, France.
I like working vineyards into my travel itineraries because I enjoy the stories: the grapes, the land, the people whose work is woven through soil, weather, and time. At Domaine Huet, in the Loire Valley, I learned that the estate’s three vineyards sit close enough that you could cover all three with the fingers of one hand on an aerial photo. Yet each has completely different soil and produces wine that varies year by year. As the tasting room host put it, only “nature” determines what ends up in the bottle. One vineyard might yield a dry wine one year and a notably sweet one the next.
At some vineyards, everything is built around the winemaker’s vision, extensive blending and adjusting to produce the wine they want. At others, the goal is scale and consistency, chemistry as much as artistry. Domaine Huet’s approach was the most explicit example I’ve encountered of letting the terroir lead. It isn’t passive. The vines still need pruning and care. Weather forces constant adjustment. The timing of the harvest is critical. But the posture is openness to possibility rather than imposing a fixed outcome, an example of servant leadership in practice.
Most organizations aren’t producing wine, but imagine executives taking real stock of their terroir: their people, in the full breadth of their experience and aspirations, their resources, and the signals coming from the marketplace. Terroir isn’t just the soil. It’s the informal knowledge and relationships as much as the formal structure, the culture that’s evolved over time, the parts that get lost in top-down initiatives.
Terroir is also a constraint. You can’t grow any grape in any soil. Strategy should guide what not to do as much as what to do. The question becomes: what might this group, in this time and place, produce that no one else could? That feels like a real path to strategic differentiation.
It also takes patience. White wines aren’t known for long shelf life, yet I was told Domaine Huet’s wines are still considered young when others are past their prime. Are you making short-term decisions with an eye on long-term potential? Are you willing to invest now in people and projects that won’t fully bloom for a decade?
What is your terroir? Not what’s in your annual report or pitch deck, but what is waiting to be called forward that could be genuinely extraordinary? Those are the answers worth struggling over.
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