The fancypants word that wine snobs use for themselves is “oenophile.” Snobs love fancypants words because it gives them the veneer of the technical, like a doctor using the Latin names of body parts. And so the subset of old-guard wine snobs who still believe that French wine is inherently the best tend to appeal to “terroir” to explain why even the very same grapes grown in similar climes in other countries can’t approach the quality of the French stuff. Terroir just means soil, and in wine terms, it’s used for the theory that some special, ineffable “je ne sais quoi” about the earth of France makes for a better red than that declasse Chilean or Californian dirt ever could.

Now, maybe French wine really is better, maybe it is not. I really don’t know anything about wine. What I know is that appealing to “terroir” is not intended as an actual scientific explanation of how the wine got the way it is. Using it is a statement about the wine snob’s own attitude. It’s a signal of alignment with a certain cultural type.