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Ian D’Agata has been appointed to the governing board as Vice President of the newly founded Association Internationale des Terroirs (AIT) on November 23-24 at the 4^th International Terroir Renaissance Symposium in Shanghai, China.

The AIT’s goals are to teach, promote, and broadcast terroir in relation to wine, tea, and all foodstuffs. The President of the AIT is Thibault Liger-Belair (of the eponymous Burgundy estate), while Aubert de Villaine, co-owner of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, is the Honorary President; Ian D’Agata, Bernard Burtschy and Jacky Rigaux are the three Vice Presidents. As explained by D’Agata in his presentation of the AIT in Shanghai “… The ultimate goal of AIT is to promote a culture of terroir, and therefore, the appreciation of wines and all foodstuffs that convey a sense of place and a tie to their land of origin. In so doing, our hope is to act on behalf’s of the planet’s biodiversity, which is put at risk by excessively industrial takes on wine and food production methods that tend to standardize colors, aromas and tastes of everything we eat and drink”.

The association will try to reach these goals through the organization of conferences, the publication of scientific papers, charity fundraisers and the granting of bursaries to young university and technical college students who devote their research projects to terroir-related aspects in wine and food. The AIT governing board will meet in Burgundy in January 2020 to begin discussions on tyhe tasks at hand; amongst the first tasks facing the AIT governing board will be the creation of a Producers Committee and an Experts Committee. The former will feature both New and Old World winemakers including the likes of Thomas Duroux (Chateau Palmer), Gregoire Gouges (Domaine Henri Gouges), Alvaro Palacios (Pingus) and Giuseppe Vajra (GD Vajra), while the latter will boast academicians and researchers such as Dominique Massenot. José Vouillamoz, and André Selosse. The AIT’s first major event, a conference devoted to an aspect of terroir currently being identified, will take place in Paris in May 2020.