Modern vs Traditional

I’ve heard these terms being thrown around often when people describe how the wines are made. What do they actually mean when someone says a wine is made in a more modern style vs traditional and are there any pros/cons to each style?

Modern . . . you can drink it.
Traditional . . . your children can drink it.

Hyperbole, but moving in the right direction. I view “modern” as being a euphemism for wine that is more approachable while young, combined with a wine that is designed to highlight its fruit components at an early age. It starts with grapes that tend to be picked relatively late when they reach full ripeness.

My interpretation of “traditional” is that it is wine that is less flavorful when young, tastes like it has higher acid (whether it actually does is a matter of debate) and does not show its best flavor components until it ages for quite a while. After longer aging its flavors, especially fruit, tend to emerge. It tends to taste drier throughout its drinking cycle, but I believe that is simply because when your tongue tastes up front fruit, your head thinks sweet, even if the residual sugar is zero.

If you want examples of the two extremes, compare a recent vintage Mollydooker Shiraz with a recent vintage Chave Hermitage. Same grape. No other similarities.

Hm, I think I’m kind of understanding what you mean. So basically traditional is what most Barolo used to be before they began to use oak? (Wait 20 years), and modern methods allow the wine to still age but are also more approachable upon release?

You’ve also got to consider the “old world” vs. “new world” terms as well. That used to mean Europe vs everywhere else, but I think the lines are starting to blur a bit as methods change and evolve wherever wine is produced.

To your original question, I think an argument can be made for three categories: Traditional, modern, and post modern. In my mind, a lot the differences have to do with the amount of oak used in the wine making process. In California, in particular, I would argue that steady amping up the oak attributes (including the use of oak chips) over time–and especially during the last decade–has resulted in distinctly different flavor profiles within the same category of wine.

I think modern and traditional are much better descriptors. Bordeaux has some modern wine makers, although the region is certainly Old World. California is considered New World, but there are quite a few Cab producers that are traditional in style.

Regarding reds.

Modern style - - - A wine with big fruity flavors, that can be enjoyed early on.
Traditional style - Will (hopefully) improve by aging in bottle, mellowing, and adding secondary and tertiary flavors.

-Not said that modern styled wines can’t age well. They probably can, but still so modern, that the
fully matured ones, are yet to come. - Perses first Pavies 1998, and 99, will eventually tell, if they age well, as a true GCC ‘A’ should…

-Soren.

Jerome - it’s like Jay described for specific reasons.

“Traditionally” wine was consumed locally and a lot of it was crap made by grandpa in the cave or cellar out back. Places like Bordeaux, which is a port, were able to ship wine outside of the local area, but many regions in Europe just stuck to the local stuff. The wines that were prized by the English tended to be sweet and/or fortified - Rieslings and sherries and the like. In northern and central Europe, they prized the sweet wines from Hungary/Austria that had no way of getting to the coast and to England.

People didn’t go to school to learn wine making and chemistry and until Pasteur, had no idea what was going on in the tanks or barrels that they were using.

When the US woke up to wine in the late 1970s and 80s, red wine mainly meant Europe. Australia had launched a plan to develop the UK market and Mondavi was leading the charge for US wine. Since most people in Napa did not have grandpa to teach them, they went to school, just as chefs in the US now go to school because they never learned to cook from their families.

US and Australian wine teachers taught cleanliness. That’s probably the biggest difference. They used clean facilities, eliminated bacteria where they could, and they used new barrels that were not contaminated with whatever. As their sales increased, people in Europe who could afford to started to do the same thing. They eliminated things like Brettanomyces. They treated the grapes more gently to avoid extracting harsh compounds - it’s like steeping your tea vs mashing tea leaves against your cup with a spoon. Grandpa picked as soon as the grapes were ripe enough to ferment because he worried about birds, frost, etc. but now people decided the risks were worth it and they picked riper grapes. They sorted the bad ones out.

Those are the main differences. They have used oak for Barolo for many years, just not necessarily new small barrels.

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Generalizations, of course, and not that I agree with them all, but…

Modern
Riper
Fruitier
Higher alcohol
Oakier
All of above = less terroir driven
Early drinking, doesn’t improve much with age

Traditional
Less ripe
Non-fruit elements more to the fore
Lower alcohol
Less oaky
All of above = more transparent and revealing of terroir and “of place”
Needs to age to reveal its greatness

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Yeah, good thing for all these European rubes that they had UC Davis and the Aussies to show them the error of their ways.

I’d say it’s best answered in the individual region
e.g. Langhe: Tradition = long maceration, large old slavonian oak; Modern = shorter maceration but with greater agitation, smaller newer French oak

A few decades ago, blending across sites would have been traditional, whilst vineyard bottlings would have been modern, but nowadays that distinction is rarely drawn.

In some instances a tradition has gone, or virtually gone - e.g. specific grapes or clones of a grape falling out of favour - such as Nebbiolo Rosé, or the near extinction of Muscadello di Montalcino that was reversed in recent years.

Going further back, what is traditional now would have been modern (and at times radical) in its day. Thus traditional vs. modern is somewhat fluid over time

I think those of you that know my palate know that I am entirely in the so-called “traditional” or “old school” camp for winemaking. I echo many of the sentiments noted above except for the idea that traditional means you must mature the wines for years for flavor to evolve. That may be true for some long-lived reds like Bordeaux, but it is not necessarily true at all for some reds like Loire Cab Franc, Beaujolais and many whites like Muscadet, Riesling, Chenin Blanc, Sav Blanc, et al. Yes, many age very well, but many are actually damn flavorful when young. Just popped a 2014 Baudry Chinon Les Granges, a base cuvee, and it was absolutely delicious, ripe and fresh. That wine also cuts against the view that traditional wines do not have ripe fruit. I guess we all have subjective views on what is ripe, but that Baudry was perfectly ripe to me. I actually had a 2011 Benetiere Cote Rotie this past weekend that was too ripe for my palate, and I’m hoping it’s just a primary stage and it will evolve.

To me, a more modern style wine tends to emphasize ripe fruit flavors, emphasize fruit flavors (and barrel flavors) over other flavors in the wine, tend to have higher alcohol and tend to be bigger and bolder. I think of a more modern wine as trying to emphasize varietal character over site. These wines tend NOT to be for aging because fruit flavors recede over time and that is the main point of these wines. They may hold, but many do not age (many lovers of modern wines will not understand this distinction). Really, what is the point to aging these wines - just to prove something? Adherents to this style really like primarily what the wine shows young in any case.

A more traditional wine tends to have lower alcohol, tends to emphasize flavors that go beyond fruit flavors (many of these flavors take years in the bottle to develop so that people who are looking for these flavors tend to wait years to drink these wines to get what they want), the wines tend to be more transparent, to emphasize clean flavors (for example they tend to have more focus - more acidity). These wines tend toward balance and tend toward lower alcohol, although this is not always true in all regions. These wines tend to age very well. Relatively few of them cannot be drunk young anymore - that is more of a myth today although it was once true. But, you get more pure fruit flavors when you drink them young (as opposed to intense fruit flavors in the more modern wine), but to get the complexity you need to age them.

Modern style wines tend to be best when drunk by themselves. Traditional wines tend to come alive most when consumed with food.

I find the notion of old world wines vs. new world wines misleading. There are fabulous traditional wines made in California (see, e.g., Ridge, Stony Hill) and many, many modern wines made in Europe (see e.g., Priorat and Toro).

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Exactly. Too bad you didn’t post this in the other thread.

There are several senses of the modern/traditional notion. I think Greg outlines one version which is sometimes given by Parker, more or less: “In the bad old days, wine was dirty and often spoiled. Modern techniques made it better.” There’s some truth in this, but there are also an awful lot of fabulous, great, great wines from the supposedly bad old days.

Soren, David and Howard outline what the polarity means most of the time. In general but not universally, modern means cleanliness plus more fruit, fewer harsh elements like hard tannins and acid.

The use of new oak is pretty common for modern/international style wines, but new oak was very much a part of the tradition in Bordeaux, Burgundy and Rioja so new oak alone does not mean modern. New oak tends to give a wine vanilla flavors that can make a young wine more approachable.

Fruitiness can be achieved in different ways – e.g., picking later so the fruit is riper, reducing tannins so the fruit is more conspicuous, fermenting partly with whole berries.

Fermenting without stems may make the wine more approachable younger.

There’s also an interaction between different techniques. Riper fruit produces higher alcohol. That, in turn, can draw more intense spice flavors out of oak barrels.

The changes in winemaking have taken different forms in different regions:

Bordeaux: The traditional wines tend to be lower in alcohol. It’s common now for “modern” classified growths (which tend to win lots of points from Parker) to come in over 14%, even 15% sometimes. That was pretty much unheard of a generation ago. Another big factor there is reverse osmosis – the removal of water to concentrate the wine. Its use became widespread in the 90s. That alters the texture of the wine. In addition, micro-oxygenation is used, pushing tiny bubbles of air or oxygen through the wine to speed up the evolution of the wine. Many of us find these wines much less subtle and less balanced and have doubts about how they will age.
Rhone: New oak barriques is kind of the signature modern techique there. Not all traditionalists used stems, but as a generalization the modernists use fewer or no stems. The following description of Gaillard’s Cote Rotie from another recent thread provides a laundry list of the modernist’s winemaking tricks – cold presoak before fermentation, high fermentation temperature, oxygenation:

destemmed, 5-7 day pre-fermentation cooling at <10°C, 4-week vinification at up to 35°C, 3 daily cap punchings, pumping overs, part vat emptying/refilling, with maceration at 30°C, aged new 228-litre oak casks (Allier, Nevers) 18-20 months, with malo completed in the casks, oxygenated every 4 months, unfiltered

By contrast, traditionalists ferment in large tanks and then age in old, neutral barrels – either 225 liter barriques or larger foudres.

Rioja: American oak barrels were the standard there traditionally, and the tempranillo produced wines that were more like pinot in color. Newer styled Rioja can be quite dark in color and is sometimes aged in French oak. It often spends less time in cask and thus has less exposure to air. The styles are very different.

Tuscany: In Chianti non-native grapes like cabernet and merlot came into fashion as blending grapes with the mainstay sangiovese. New oak also was used. Those wines tend to be much darker and extracted. (I’ll leave aside what happened with Brunello, where all sorts of non-sangiovese grapes were use, in addition to new oak.)

Barolo/Barbaresco: As Ian said, new oak barriques were only part of the formula there. Because of nebbiolo’s hard tannins, the modernists there shortened the maceration time on the skins from the traditional 20-30 days to as short as 5-7 days. These tended to be more approachable young. The downside was that the oak, if overdone, could cover up the aromatics, which is what nebbiolo is really all about. And in some cases the hard oak tannins just compounded the grape tannins. Another change was to less time in cask – bottling the wine sooner. That’s the norm for the traditionalists now, too. That tends to give you more fruit flavors.

California: New oak, including American oak, was part of the technique going back many decades. So that’s not the distinguishing feature of the new winemaking. What’s new is picking so much later, to the point where it’s rare to find a cabernet, pinot or syrah below 14.5% and many are over 15%. And a high portion of those wines were watered or had reverse osmosis to lower the alcohol – they would have had even higher alcohol if water hadn’t been added or alcohol removed. To my palate, many of these are wildly out of balance, and it’s often hard to tell what the grape was if you taste the wines blindly.

Elsewhere in the world where traditions were less established (or less worthy), the modern formula of ripe fruit, lots of oak, soft tannins and low acid is pretty widely followed.

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Solid, John!

Horrors! So it’s actually not worth the tariff?

I’ve got a better one:

Modern - EVERYbody loves it.
Traditional - only those stuck-up prisses from WB will gloat over it and brag about loving it.

John - obviously you know I agree with you. I’m not taking the extreme view you suggest, but given a few recent threads where people are essentially asking for confirmation of their preconceptions, I figured I’d highlight the outlines.

Your explanation is too elaborate and smacks of wine snobbery.

“Traditional” is what you tasted when you were learning about an area/wine maker. The definition of “area” can be a small region or an entire continent.

“Modern” is what is not the above.

One of the best general and easiest to understand overviews I’ve seen. I’m stealing this from you to use.

I was trying to be even handed for the new guy, but I must say that 95% of the non-geeks prefer modern wine.