Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Terroir" in English language version.
[...] the period most crucial in the region's history was the thousand-year period from the eighth century to the French Revolution, when much of the land and most of its wines were under the powerful command of Benedictine and Cistercian monks. [...] Contemplative by nature, patient in temperament, systematic in approach, committed to grueling physical labor, well bestowed with land, and, most important, literate, the monks were uniquely prepared for their mission: to delineate and codify Burgundy's vineyards. Plot by plot, they cleared and cultivated the most difficult limestone slopes of the Côte d'Or, studiously comparing vineyards and the wines made from them, recording their impressions over centuries. Tantamount to a millennium-long research project, the work of these monks [...] in fact, for the first time, established terroir as the critical core of viticulture.
The secondary metabolites of the dicotyledonous plants found in mountain pastures like terpenoids or phenolic compounds are directly transferred to animal products
