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Cannabis Terroir: How Place Shapes the Flower in Your Jar · Bite Me The Show About Edibles

1:16
Margaret: Picture a tomato you picked off the vine in late August.
1:20
Margaret: It's still warm from the sun.
1:22
Margaret: You bite into it standing right there in the garden and the juice runs down your wrist.
1:27
Margaret: Sweet, a little sharp, almost grassy.
1:30
Margaret: Now picture a tomato from the grocery store in February.
1:35
Margaret: Maybe it's even the same variety.
1:37
Margaret: It's red, it's round, it's technically a tomato.
1:41
Margaret: It's not the same tomato.
1:44
Margaret: Same genetics, completely different experience.
1:48
Margaret: And the difference isn't magic.
1:50
Margaret: It's sun and soil and water and temperature and timing.
1:54
Margaret: It's where that plant lived and how it was treated.
1:57
Margaret: The French have a word for that.
1:59
Margaret: They've been fighting over it for about a hundred years, mostly about wine.
2:04
Margaret: And now in California, it's being written into cannabis law.
2:08
Margaret: The word is terroir, and it's sitting in your jar right now, whether you've noticed it or not.
2:16
Margaret: Welcome friends to episode 371.
2:20
Margaret: Today we're talking about terroir, how the place a cannabis plant grows shapes what ends up in your jar.
2:29
Margaret: I'm your host, Margaret, a certified gangier, a TCI certified cannabis educator, and I believe your kitchen is the best dispensary you'll ever have.
2:38
Margaret: Welcome to Bite Me The Show But Edibles, grab a snack, and let's dive in.
2:43
Margaret: So I'm gonna be honest with you, right out of the gate here.
2:47
Margaret: I had planned to bring in a guest for this one, and the timing just didn't work out.
2:51
Margaret: But this topic is close to my heart.
2:53
Margaret: I'm a certified gangier, as I already mentioned in the intro, and I've been one since 2021.
2:59
Margaret: And a big part of that training is learning to evaluate flour with your senses, looking at it, smelling it, tasting it, and asking why it smells and tastes the way it does.
3:09
Margaret: And place is part of that answer.
3:11
Margaret: So it's just you and me today, and here's where we're headed.
3:15
Margaret: First, what terroir actually means, because it's a word that gets thrown around a lot and understood a lot less.
3:22
Margaret: Then we'll borrow from the wine world since most of us at least have a passing idea of what champagne or Napa Valley means on a label.
3:30
Margaret: That gives us a bridge from something familiar to something new.
3:34
Margaret: Then we'll get into the plant itself, what changes with place and where the science is solid versus where it's still mostly vibes.
3:43
Margaret: We'll look at California, which is building the world's first legal cannabis appellation program.
3:48
Margaret: And then we'll bring it home to your kitchen because this is, after all, an edibles show, and I owe you the answer about whether any of this survives the infusion.
3:57
Margaret: And at the end, I've got something fun for any Bite Me Cannabis Club members, so stick around for that.
4:08
Speaker: So what is terroir actually?
4:11
Speaker: Terroir comes from the French word terre, meaning earth or land.
4:18
Speaker: But if you translate it as dirt, you've missed most of it.
4:22
Speaker: Terroir is the whole environment a plant grows up in.
4:26
Speaker: And the way that environment shows up in the finished product, it's usually broken into a few pieces.
4:32
Speaker: There's climate, how much sun, how hot the days get, how cold the nights drop, how much rain falls, and when.
4:40
Speaker: And not just the regional climate, but the microclimate, the particular hillside, the valley that holds morning fog, the slope that catches the afternoon light.
4:50
Speaker: Then there's soil.
4:51
Speaker: Soil is what it's made of, how it drains, how much water it holds, what's living in it.
4:57
Speaker: Healthy soil is a whole ecosystem of fungi and bacteria working with the roots.
5:03
Speaker: There's topography, elevation, the way the land faces, how steep it is.
5:08
Speaker: And then there's the piece people forget, which is the human piece, tradition, farming practices handed down when a region picks how it dries and cures which varieties the growers have kept alive for decades.
5:22
Speaker: In most serious definitions of terroir, the people are part of the place.
5:28
Speaker: And this is how I like to think about it.
5:30
Speaker: Genetics is the recipe, terroir is the kitchen.
5:34
Speaker: You and I could make the exact same brownie, same ingredients, same measurements, but your oven runs a little hot and mine runs cool.
5:43
Speaker: You live at altitude and I don't.
5:45
Speaker: You pull yours at 25 minutes and I leave mine for 28 because I got distracted.
5:49
Speaker: We end up with two different brownies from one recipe.
5:53
Speaker: That, friends, is terroir.
5:56
Speaker: The recipe sets what's possible.
5:58
Speaker: The kitchen decides what actually comes out of the pan.
6:01
Speaker: Plant scientists have a less delicious way of saying this.
6:05
Speaker: Genotype plus environment equals phenotype.
6:09
Speaker: The genotype is the genetic code.
6:12
Speaker: The phenotype is how that code actually expresses itself.
6:16
Speaker: The plant you can see and smell and smoke or infuse.
6:20
Speaker: The same clone grown in two different places will not come out identical because the environment is pulling different levers on the same genes.
6:28
Speaker: One more thing before we move on, because it matters for everything that follows.
6:33
Speaker: Terroir only really exists where a plant has a relationship with a place.
6:38
Speaker: A plant grown indoors under lights in a controlled room with a dialed-in temperature and humidity is designed to be the same no matter where the building is.
6:47
Speaker: That's the whole point of indoor consistency.
6:50
Speaker: You can grow the same clone in Toronto or Phoenix and get the same flower.
6:55
Speaker: That's not a knock on indoor, it's just a different philosophy.
6:59
Speaker: Indoor is about control, terroir is about letting a place have its say.
7:04
Speaker: And that tension, control versus place, is exactly where the wine world spent the last century sorting out.
7:13
Speaker: If you've ever bought a bottle of champagne, you've already bought into terroir.
7:19
Speaker: Champagne isn't a style of wine, it's a place, a region in northeastern France.
7:26
Speaker: Sparkling wine, made the same way in California or in Ontario, can be delicious, but legally it can't be called champagne.
7:33
Speaker: That name is protected.
7:35
Speaker: That protection is called an appellation.
7:37
Speaker: An appellation is a legally protected name that ties a product to where it came from and usually just some rules about how it's made.
7:45
Speaker: And it's not just wine.
7:46
Speaker: Some of your favorite foods live under the same kind of system.
7:50
Speaker: Parmigiano Reggiano is a protected name tied to a specific part of northern Italy.
7:56
Speaker: Tequila has to come from specific regions of Mexico.
7:59
Speaker: So if you've ever grated real parm over your pasta and noticed it tastes nothing like the green shaker cam, congratulations.
8:06
Speaker: You're a terroir person.
8:08
Speaker: You just didn't know it yet.
8:10
Speaker: Now there are two big models for how appalacians work and the difference matters for cannabis.
8:15
Speaker: The European model, the one France built, protects the place and the method.
8:20
Speaker: It doesn't just say this wine came from Burgundy.
8:23
Speaker: It can say which grape varieties you're allowed to use, how you grow them, how you make the wine.
8:29
Speaker: The name is a promise about both where and how.
8:32
Speaker: The American model is looser.
8:35
Speaker: In the US, wine regions are called American viticultural areas or AVAs.
8:41
Speaker: Napa Valley became one in 1981.
8:44
Speaker: To put an AVA name on a label, at least 85% of the grapes have to come from that area.
8:50
Speaker: But the AVA itself mostly defines geography.
8:54
Speaker: It doesn't tell a Napa winemaker how to farm.
8:57
Speaker: So why did any of this matter to growers?
9:00
Speaker: Here's the part that should sound familiar to anyone watching the cannabis market right now.
9:05
Speaker: The story often told about Napa is that geographic identity gave smaller producers something big producers couldn't easily copy.
9:13
Speaker: You can scale a factory.
9:15
Speaker: You can't scale a hillside.
9:17
Speaker: People will pay more for Napa Valley Cabernet than for a bottle that just says California, and that premium gave family vineyards room to compete on quality and place instead of price and volume.
9:28
Speaker: Even in wine, the science of terroir is messier than the marketing.
9:33
Speaker: People love to say that they can taste the limestone or the slate in a wine.
9:37
Speaker: Wine researchers still argue about whether soil minerals show up as flavor in any direct way.
9:43
Speaker: What's much better supported is that climate, water, and how the vines are farmed shape how the grape ripens and ripening shapes flavor.
9:50
Speaker: So terroir is real, but it's not always working the way the poetic version on the back label says it is.
9:57
Speaker: Hold on to that thought because it's going to matter when we get to cannabis.
10:01
Speaker: When California designed the cannabis appellation rules, it didn't just copy the American wine model, it went further, more like the European approach, with rules about method baked right in, and in some ways stricter than wine has ever been.
10:16
Speaker: We'll get into those details, but let's first talk about the plant.
10:20
Speaker: So what actually changes when you move a cannabis plant from one place to another?
10:29
Speaker: Let's walk through the big levers and I'll tell you where the evidence is strong and where it's thinner.
10:34
Speaker: Light.
10:35
Speaker: The sun is a much bigger, messier light source than any grow lamp.
10:39
Speaker: Outdoor plants get the full sun spectrum, including ultraviolet, and that intensity shifts across a season and across latitudes.
10:47
Speaker: UV is often linked to trichome production, since trichomes may help protect the plant from sun stress.
10:53
Speaker: That's a reasonable idea with some research behind it, but studies on UV and cannabinoid levels have come back mixed.
11:00
Speaker: So I call it plausible but not yet proven.
11:03
Speaker: Temperature, this one's better understood.
11:05
Speaker: Temperatures are volatile, meaning they evaporate easily and heat drives them off.
11:10
Speaker: A plant that bakes through a brutal heat wave in late flower can lose some of the aroma it would have had in a milder spot.
11:17
Speaker: Cool nights matter too.
11:19
Speaker: In some genetics, cold nights near the end of the season bring out those purple and deep red colors.
11:23
Speaker: That's the same pigment family that turns maple leaves red in the fall.
11:27
Speaker: Humidity and fog.
11:29
Speaker: A foggy coastal valley and a dry inland hillside are two very different lives for a plant.
11:35
Speaker: Fog keeps temperatures gentle.
11:37
Speaker: It also raises the risk of mold, and that's where terroir gets interesting.
11:41
Speaker: Over decades, growers in a damp region keep the plant that survive and let go of the ones that rot.
11:48
Speaker: So the place doesn't just shape the plant in one season, it shapes which genetics a whole community ends up keeping.
11:55
Speaker: Soil.
11:56
Speaker: Here's while I'll ask you to be a little bit skeptical.
11:58
Speaker: Healthy living soil clearly supports a healthy plant, and a healthy plant is better at making everything it's capable of.
12:05
Speaker: But the idea that you can taste a specific soil in your flower, the way that people say they taste limestone, limestone, and wine, that's the least proven part of the whole terroir story for cannabis and for wine.
12:17
Speaker: Then there's season and timing.
12:19
Speaker: How long the growing season runs, when the rains come, when the first frost threatens, all that decides when a farmer harvests and the timing changes the chemistry of the flower.
12:31
Speaker: And there's the part that happens after the plant comes out of the ground, drying and curing.
12:36
Speaker: I cannot stress this enough.
12:38
Speaker: You can grow the most beautiful plant on the most perfect hillside in the world, and a rushed, hot, sloppy dry will flatten it.
12:45
Speaker: And a bad cure erases a great place.
12:48
Speaker: This is the human side of terroir, and it's one reason small legacy farms fight so hard to be recognized for what they do.
12:56
Speaker: And all of this probably makes sense to you if you're growing yourself, even a plant or two, if you have that ability.
13:03
Speaker: The flower that I'm growing in Ontario, you could take that very same genetics, that very same seed, and plant it in California, and the expression would be very different.
13:14
Speaker: Here's the bottom line: genetics still does a lot of heavy lifting.
13:18
Speaker: A lemony cultivar is not going to turn into a gassy one because you moved it to a different county.
13:23
Speaker: What place does is turn the dial, brighter or muted, sharper or rounded, more of this terpene, less of that one.
13:31
Speaker: And we have a lot less controlled research on this than we should because for most of the last century you couldn't legally study the plant properly.
13:38
Speaker: So a lot of what we know about cannabis terroir comes from farmers who've been paying close attention for generations.
13:44
Speaker: That knowledge is real.
13:46
Speaker: It just hasn't all been measured yet.
13:48
Speaker: This totally makes sense to me because I have noticed myself that if I grow cannabis in one spot versus another, I'm going to have a different expression.
13:58
Speaker: I found a much sunnier spot for some of my cannabis this year and it did fabulous than other years.
14:04
Speaker: Sometimes I grow directly in the soil, sometimes I grow in a pot.
14:07
Speaker: Even in my old house, the cannabis that I was growing in the yard was very different than the cannabis I'm growing where I am now, in large part because I have more access to an open, sunny space.
14:21
Speaker: Whereas in my last area where I could grow, there was so much shade from the trees in my backyard, and there wasn't really much I could do about it.
14:28
Speaker: I'm sure if you've been growing any cannabis yourself, you've probably noticed similar phenomena.
14:35
Speaker: Now, everything we've talked about so far is about California specifically.
14:38
Speaker: Other states and here in Canada work differently, and I'll come back to that.
14:43
Speaker: The idea of cannabis appellations in California goes back to Proposition 64 in 2016, the vote that legalized adult use in the state.
14:52
Speaker: The program is run by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which is a nice detail when you think about it.
14:59
Speaker: Cannabis being handled by the same department that handles every other crop.
15:03
Speaker: The goal is the same one we talked about with wine, though, a protected name that tells you where your cannabis came from and how it was grown.
15:09
Speaker: So a region name on a label would actually mean something, the way Napa Valley does on a wine bottle.
15:15
Speaker: And here's where it gets stricter than wine.
15:17
Speaker: Remember that 85% rule for American wine regions?
15:21
Speaker: For a California cannabis appellation, the flour has to come entirely from that region.
15:26
Speaker: And the growing rules are baked in.
15:28
Speaker: The plants have to be farmed outdoors, in the ground, under the sun.
15:33
Speaker: No greenhouses, no hoop houses, no supplemental lights.
15:37
Speaker: That's terroir in its purest form.
15:39
Speaker: If a plant isn't living in a real relationship with that soil and that weather, it doesn't get to carry the name, which also means greenhouse flour, no matter how good it is, doesn't qualify.
15:50
Speaker: As you can imagine, not everyone in the industry loves that.
15:53
Speaker: So how does a region actually get an appellation?
15:56
Speaker: Farmers in an area band together and write a petition.
15:58
Speaker: The Origins Council, a California group that advocates for legacy growing regions, describes it this way: growers lay out their region's geography, history, farming practices, quality standards, and cultivars, and make the case that together those things produce something distinct.
16:14
Speaker: Then the state reviews it.
16:16
Speaker: That's the vision.
16:18
Speaker: Now the reality, as of the day I'm recording this, there are still no established cannabis appellations in California.
16:25
Speaker: The state has initial regulations on the books, but it's still finalizing key pieces and it isn't accepting petitions right now.
16:32
Speaker: The most recent public comment period on the rules closed in August 2026, and the state says it expects to open petitions in late 2026.
16:43
Speaker: Some of the holdups are old arguments.
16:46
Speaker: Where exactly do you draw a region's boundary?
16:49
Speaker: And should light deprivation growing count as outdoor?
16:53
Speaker: Purists say no.
16:54
Speaker: Plenty of farmers say yes.
16:57
Speaker: Meanwhile, the small farmers this was meant to protect are under real pressure.
17:01
Speaker: Outdoor flour prices have fallen hard and compliance costs keep climbing.
17:06
Speaker: Some of the legacy growers who inspired this whole idea may not be around by the time it's finished.
17:11
Speaker: And that's the quiet political heart of this story for me.
17:14
Speaker: Appellations are about who gets credit for the knowledge.
17:17
Speaker: These regions kept cannabis genetics and growing craft alive through decades of prohibition, often at real personal risk.
17:26
Speaker: An appellation says that work belongs to a place and a community, not to whoever can build the biggest greenhouse.
17:34
Speaker: As for us up here, as far as I know in Canada, we don't have anything like a cannabis appellation system.
17:40
Speaker: Our legal market was built around indoor production and consistency.
17:44
Speaker: So for now, if you want to explore terroir as a Canadian, the best place to start might be your own backyard.
17:50
Speaker: I will say though, there are a growing number of cannabis producers in the legal market who are growing outdoors.
17:56
Speaker: Some in Ontario, some in British Columbia, probably elsewhere.
18:00
Speaker: I'm sure there's plenty of farmers I don't know about yet.
18:03
Speaker: But that does beg the question: can you create cannabis appellations in areas of Ontario or British Columbia?
18:13
Speaker: I mean, BC weed is known for its quality after all.
18:17
Speaker: Does terroir make it into your edibles?
18:23
Speaker: This is an edibles show, and so it would be silly if I didn't talk about it, of course.
18:29
Speaker: And some of you have probably been thinking about it in the back of your mind as you listen.
18:33
Speaker: Does any of this survive the kitchen?
18:35
Speaker: Mostly no.
18:36
Speaker: At least not the part you smell.
18:38
Speaker: If you caught episode 368, you already know where I'm going with this.
18:42
Speaker: Terpenes are volatile.
18:44
Speaker: Decarbing and infusing introduce heat, time, fat, and a lot of those delicate aromatic compounds don't make it through that process.
18:53
Speaker: That bright citrus note from a coastal farm is mostly gone by the time it's in your butter.
18:59
Speaker: Gentler, lower temperature methods hang on to more of it, but you're always trading some of it away.
19:04
Speaker: So does terroir matter for edibles at all?
19:07
Speaker: I think it does in two ways.
19:09
Speaker: The first is potency.
19:11
Speaker: The same genetics can test differently from one season for one farm to the next.
19:16
Speaker: That's terroir too.
19:18
Speaker: It's just less romantic.
19:19
Speaker: It's why I kept telling you to check the numbers on every batch of flour, not just the cultivar name.
19:24
Speaker: That's exactly what the bite me dosage calculator is for.
19:27
Speaker: The second is quality in general.
19:28
Speaker: A well-grown, well-cured plant from a place that suits it is simply better starting material.
19:34
Speaker: You're cooking with better ingredients.
19:35
Speaker: And we all know the rule.
19:37
Speaker: Great ingredients don't guarantee a great dish, but bad ingredients do guarantee a bad one.
19:43
Speaker: And for my home growers, your backyard has terroir.
19:47
Speaker: Your balcony has terroir.
19:49
Speaker: Every season you grow in the same spot, your plants are telling you something about that place.
19:54
Speaker: The sun it gets, the soil you've built, how your summer went.
19:59
Speaker: You are in a very real way an appellation of one.
20:03
Speaker: So pay attention to it.
20:04
Speaker: Write down what grew, where, and what the weather did.
20:08
Speaker: Note how the flowers smelled at harvest and after the cure.
20:12
Speaker: Your kitchen is the best dispensary you'll ever have, and your garden is the best farm you'll ever know intimately.
20:18
Speaker: And like I said, that's regardless of whether you're growing in a huge field or whether you're putting a plant in a pot on your balcony.
20:26
Speaker: Tracking it over a few seasons is how you start to recognize your own terroir.
20:31
Speaker: And if you don't grow, you can still train your nose, which brings me to the fun part.
20:35
Speaker: This episode kicks off something I'm really excited about in the Bite Me Cannabis Club.
20:40
Speaker: It's called the Paladin Sensory Challenge.
20:42
Speaker: Here's the thing about terroir: you can't taste it if you've never trained yourself to notice anything beyond smells like weed.
20:50
Speaker: And most of us were never taught how.
20:52
Speaker: We were taught to look at a THC number and call it a day.
20:55
Speaker: So in this challenge, we're going to slow down and use our senses on purpose, the same way I was trained to as a gangier.
21:02
Speaker: And as a gangier, we are looking at four different criteria: appearance, aroma, flavor, and experience.
21:10
Speaker: And a lot of the times when we're looking at flour, we don't spend the time to look at it, smell it before and after, breaking it open, noticing the texture, the taste, and then being able to describe it in a sentence or two.
21:23
Speaker: The challenge runs from October 1st until the end of October.
21:28
Speaker: We're going to be using everyday kitchen materials to look at terpenes and training our nose, because obviously not everybody always has access to flour that has a high amount of caryophylline, perhaps.
21:41
Speaker: Or maybe you're low on flour that has a lot of lemonine.
21:44
Speaker: So we're going to be using everyday kitchen items.
21:47
Speaker: There are live events, posts, and check-ins.
21:50
Speaker: I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
21:51
Speaker: And that's your own little terroir experiment right there on your kitchen table.
21:55
Speaker: And here's what I'd love to hear from you.
21:57
Speaker: When you slow down and pay attention to the flour that you're consuming, what did you notice that you've never paid attention to before?
22:04
Speaker: That's the question.
22:05
Speaker: There are no wrong answers, just better noses.
22:09
Speaker: And I feel like that is something we can always work on, slowing down and paying attention.
22:15
Speaker: I keep thinking back to that tomato.
22:17
Speaker: The reason the August tomato tastes better isn't a secret technique, is that it lived somewhere real.
22:24
Speaker: It had a summer.
22:24
Speaker: Somebody paid attention to it.
22:26
Speaker: That's really what terroir asks of us.
22:29
Speaker: Not that we memorize soil types or become cannabis someliers overnight, but just that we pay attention to where our cannabis comes from, who grew it, and how.
22:39
Speaker: And to what our own senses are telling us when we open the jar.
22:44
Speaker: The nose knows, as they always say.
22:47
Speaker: The science on cannabis terroir is still young, and I'd rather tell you that straight than try and oversell it here.
22:54
Speaker: Although maybe this whole episode has been me trying to oversell it, but genetics carries most of the weight.
23:00
Speaker: Place turns the dial, and a whole lot of what we know comes from farmers who are paying attention long before any government decided to write it down.
23:07
Speaker: So whether you're buying from a small farm, growing in your backyard, or just smelling two jars side by side at your kitchen table, you're part of that same tradition.
23:17
Speaker: Noticing, asking, why, taking control of your high life one sniff at a time.
23:23
Speaker: Thanks for spending time with me today, my friends.
23:26
Speaker: If this episode got you thinking, please share with a friend who thinks all weed taste the same.
23:31
Speaker: Join us in the Bite Me Canvas Club for the Palette and Sensory Challenge.
23:35
Speaker: I am your host, Margaret.
23:37
Speaker: And until next time, stay curious and stay high.