A Taste of Time & Place: A Love Letter to Terroir in Small-Batch Herbalism

June 10, 2026

Confessions from the Wild: Volume III

There's a jug of one of our newest elixirs, Elder & Lemon Thyme, sitting on my workbench right now. It's waiting to be bottled, labeled, and then lined up like quiet witnesses to the season on the shop shelves.

It's this season's batch, with elderberries harvested by our farmer friends just over the mountain, yarrow from the field next to the old apple orchard, and spicebush berry I harvested while out hiking last fall. All of these ingredients from the same season, same-but-different mountain soil, same-but-different mountain microclimates. It's sweet and earthy, herbaceous and peppery, and I can't help but wonder what next year's batch will be like.

Maybe the elderberries will be a touch earthier or the yarrow extra bitter. Time and place will tell. It'll be the same, but a little different.

Walk into any grocery store in any city any month of the year, and the tomatoes look exactly alike: round, red, uniform, dutiful. Famously, they taste like almost nothing and it's by design.

A feature, not a flaw, engineered to survive shipping, to ripen on command, to make no surprising demands on you. To be above all, consistent.

But a tomato is never a single data point. It's an entire season of life on planet Earth, shaped by all the seasons that came before, happening inside a single fruit.

It's the drought in July and the slow cool of September. It's what the soil had to offer this time, and what it couldn't. It's fungal conversations underground, pollinator traffic, the particular slant of the light in that field, in that valley, in that season.

When you eat a tomato that actually tastes like something, you're tasting not a single calculated moment, but an entire evolution of time and place.

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A few years ago, I found myself really drawn to wine and the utterly fascinating concept of terroir. I jumped at a part-time job in the largest restaurant wine cellar in the entire country to see what I could learn.

What I found instead was an end of the industry so far removed from what I, perhaps naively, thought of as the heart and soul of winemaking. One night, after watching the head sommelier who'd been in the industry for decades behave like a child over an imperfect glass and I instantly understood that what I was looking for wasn't in a cellar, but instead, in a field. I was looking for art, expression, and a connection to the natural world, but instead just found a lot of empty pomp and circumstance.

Terroir, rooted in the French winemaking tradition and formalized through centuries of careful observation, is the idea that a wine carries the character of its place: the soil, the microclimate, the touch of the hands that tended it.

Two bottles of the same grape from the same vineyard, different years: different wines. Not better or worse, exactly. Just an honest expression of life, grounded in the unique specifics of what the earth was doing at that particular moment in history.

Worth noting: the phrase goût de terroir ("taste of place") originally emerged in wine writing in the 17th century, and for a long time it was used to describe a defect, a wine that was too earthy, too unrefined, too rustic. Only recently, since the 1930s, has it been reclaimed as something to seek out and celebrate. A reframe that I find just oh-so delightful.

Serious olive oil people know this too. A harvest pressed in a dry year produces oil with a sharper, more peppery finish. A cool, wet season yields something rounder, grassier. Aficionados chase these differences the way wine lovers chase vintages.

Honey carries it as well: bees gathering from wildflowers and mesquite in Texas Hill Country produce something entirely different than bees working the tulip poplar and sourwood blooms of the southern Appalachians.

Cheese, maple syrup, single-origin chocolate, coffee harvested from a specific mountain farm in Panama: the serious makers in all of these worlds understand that inconsistency is not a defect, but a fingerprint. Evidence of authenticity. Proof of connection to a place in time. It's the most honest thing a maker can offer.

Food scholar Amy Trubek explored all of this in her 2008 book The Taste of Place, which expanded the terroir concept beyond wine into American food culture broadly, from hickory nuts in Wisconsin to maple syrup in Vermont, asking:

How can we reclaim the taste of place in a country where food has traveled an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table?

Writer Rowan Jacobsen took a similar journey in American Terroir, tracing the "flavor landscapes" of honey, oysters, salmon, and more across the American continent.

Both were asking the same question: if we extend this reverence to wine, why not to everything that grows?

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Richard Christiansen of Flamingo Estate is the most recent person I heard name this so plainly: radical inconsistency. "We encourage it in wine," he said. "We sort of encourage it in olive oil. So why don't we encourage it in hand soap?

It should always be really good, but it should never be the same."

That idea extends just as naturally, maybe even more naturally, into the world of medicinal herbs. And yet, in an industry that has taken to extracting and standardizing the therapeutic biochemicals found in medicinal plants and packing them into pills, it's rarely talked about.

Plants make medicine in response to their world. A stressed plant, a plant that has fought for something, often makes different chemistry than one that had an easy season. Neither is wrong. They're just telling different stories in the language of alkaloids and terpenes and phenols.

Each and every tea we blend and elixir we bottle is a record of what the season gave us. I think it's one of the greatest gifts of the privilege of using freshly harvested ingredients.

We could try to flatten this. We could chase a fixed flavor profile and call it quality control. But to do that would be to tell a quiet lie, to pretend that the living world doesn't change, that the indelible interconnectedness with the ever-evolving natural world shaped by centuries of time isn't real. Or worse, something to hide.

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When you choose to buy from small, local farms and small businesses like mine who buy from small, local farms, to eat and drink the things that still carry a connection to where they grew, you're choosing foods and medicines still alive in their conversation with the earth.

It requires a little curiosity, a willingness to notice, a palate that pays attention. And in return, the gift of being invited into that dynamic conversation with the living world.

I like to think about us humans as an expression of terroir too, living organisms in constant dialogue with the natural and unnatural world around us, each of us an expressions of the world we live in.

We hope you can taste the seasons in our products. Not just the classic, expected flavor profiles of the herbs themselves, but the unique, unrepeatable time and place they come from.

To living wildly well.