So here’s an attempt to untangle the situation. Surely, if we are to understand vineyards, how rocks and soils might affect the growing vine and perhaps the wine that results, we have first to be reasonably systematic with the terms we are using. Outside geology, however, the lack of distinction still hangs on, and hence the confusion. Consequently, for well over a century now, geologists have used tuff to refer only to volcanic rocks, and tufa for a calcareous rock formed by localized precipitation from cold groundwater. Geologists, however, saw during the 1800s, as their science was growing, that this was unhelpful to understanding and a consensus evolved that the name “tuff” should be restricted to volcanic material. So, now we had two words in English, tuff and tufa, being used for convenient building blocks irrespective of the kind of rock. In Britain, the word tuff long held sway for any porous, softish building stone that wasn’t obviously, say, limestone, sandstone, or granite.īy the18th-century, however, when the British stone dealers of the day learned that their Italian counterparts were using the word tufa, they took the opportunity to try to convince architects that this exotic sounding word was preferable to old-fashioned, Anglo-Saxon-sounding tuff. Thus, for example, le tuffe evolved in French, and tuff in English. And to complicate things further for us today, the word became variously transmuted into the local vernaculars. Then, as blocks of building stone became employed across the expanding empire, they, too, were referred to as tophus, irrespective of what the rock was. We now know that in Rome some of it consisted of rocks derived from the fine ejectimenta of the region’s volcanoes-what geologists would now call tuff-and some from matter precipitated from flowing springs, which includes the tufa of modern geologists. When the architects and builders of the infant empire began to construct grand buildings worthy of its new status, they found to hand, right there in the capital, material that was easy to extract in blocks well suited to this monumental style. The root of the confusion lies back in classical Roman times. But neither are things tangle-free within geology-for instance, there’s another rock in the frame, the celebrated travertine, that geologically is closely related to tufa but awkward to distinguish. Thus, there’s a difficulty their meaning in wine writing is often unclear. Outside geology, however, these “t” words tend to be used loosely, even synonymously and interchangeably. In geology, each term refers to a material of a specific nature, with a meaning that doesn’t fit with those quotations. So, what’s the problem? Well, to a geologist all of those quotations in one way or another are wrong. You may have seen the kind of thing:“The cellars, as is typical of the Eger region, are cut into the soft tufa” “ Saumur-the capital of tuff” “the soils are primarily clay above volcanic tuft” “the ground consists of calcareous tuff” “the Classico zone of Orvieto consists of tufo, similar to the tuffeau of parts of the Loire.” We are talking, of course, about names for geological materials-names that, because most of them occur in vineyards around the world, appear in the literature on wine. And to these tricky “t” words, I could add tuf, tufi, tofa, tuft, and others.
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