“Most historical discussions of terroir make some mention of medieval or Renaissance precedents (e.g. Charles VI and his 1411 edict about Roquefort), but their emphasis is on the last century and a half. Terroir, it always seems, was an inchoate concept, waiting to be truly born in the Bordeaux classifications prepared for Napoleon III in 1855. Thomas Parker corrects this myopic view of the concept with his new intellectual history, Tasting French Terroir: The History of an Idea. Parker’s project is to connect historical understandings of Frenchness in language, place, and food. He shows that rather than arising solely in the realm of agricultural discourse, the conception of terroir developed in a broader debate of French intellectuals about the influence of the actual land of France on its language, and on its people. Extending geography as a determining factor in the tastes of regional specialties was, as the evidence presented demonstrates, not a large conceptual leap…”