Terroir, Change, Market and Narcissism

The T concept is much debated these days, and purists vs negationists is a battle of extremes that runs the risk of getting into a black and white logic: all or nothing.
Terroir is usually associated with tradition, and most places where people rely on the concept,

have centuries long traditions. When you ask a winemaker from Chianti or Burgundy, the reason of their practice, they will often answer "because we have always done this". But is it truly so? If we take Chianti, for example, which I know better, going back in time, we can see how much it has changed. It was Bettino Ricasoli less than 200 years ago to give a first rule, about what Chianti was, in terms of grapes and locations, but afterwards it went on changing, diminishing white grapes in the blend, and finally, accepting 100% Sangiovese as a possibility. If we talk about how vines were cultivated, the evolution is even more dramatic, from plants scattered around in a farm free of rootstocks, all the way to monoculture, mechanization, and now higher densities and back to natural practices.
Terroir evolves, as does any reality that has life in itself, and that has many people working at, with their ideas, and their enthusiasm, its rules are not written on stone, and slowly changes with common practice.
The market, often regarded with suspect, has necessarily a strong impact on it, and its pressure does influence the direction where a Terroir is going. Some purists claim that authentic wines ignore the Market, or impose their style on it, but what we call market is a collective behavior, emerging of a very vast pool of individual, in which chaos and order compete, and if your wine doesn't sell, you will stop making it soon. Winemakers need to find a way of navigating the market and producing a wine that is true to own beliefs, but at the same time appreciated by a sufficient number of people, so that the winery can sell it and make ends meet. There is a balance to be found here among self and others, or self and outside world.
Terroir is truly a way of looking at wine, an aesthetic that starts from the soil and the tradition, to set a profile, and then leaves ample freedom to the vintner when it comes to style. Terroir is a shared knowledge that requires you to study and learn from previous generations and from others around you, and try to read the wine starting from what you saw in the vineyard, or under the soil surface, and in this particular growing season weather pattern. The winemaker exercise is to find a rationale linking those elements and the liquid in the glass. Intervention and technology are reduced to a minimum, as every time you do something you get the wine one step further away from its origin.
When you set those boundaries to your winemaking efforts, all your action, and everything you taste, acquires a different meaning.
Opposite to Terroir wines,  in Winemaker's Wines, the author searches beauty, a pure, abstract concept, not linked to a specific place, but to a specific palate, an ideal wine that he can take wherever he goes.
Which grape to use, or which kind of aging, are a free winemaking choice in those wines, and the use of technology is perfectly all right, as the winemaker is not trying to stay true to origin, but to attain his own aesthetic goal.
Making Terroir wines means to acknowledge that there is a driving force in wine beyond the winemaker idea of what is good, it means to confront yourself with a boundary, with an external creative entity. We live in the age of Narcissism,  the age where setting up a show of our private lives through all means possible has become common, and it gets harder and harder for successful winemakers to get beyond their ego in this cultural climate, but making Terroir wine is a sure method to get to a better self and a more interesting liquid.