Modern vs Traditional

WINE TALK
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+1000

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Look for the following wines

Dublere (Blair makes a range of wines but they start very reasonably priced)
Drouhin Chorey les Beaune
Hudelot-Noellat Bourgogne Rouge (I have recently seen the 2012 for $20)

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That’s what I think I’ve been trying. I’ll almost always give something one chance (sometimes even two [basic-smile.gif] ). And I think there is a conclusion that I have arrived at for red wines that I can’t put into words correctly because I don’t think it makes sense: I like fruit flavors and smells in wine, but I don’t like it to be sweet and too vanilla-y(?). I didn’t really like Caymus, Insignia, Stag’s Leap Fay, Mondavi Oakville, Orin Swift Palermo and others along the same line. I am not saying that they are all the same, nor am I saying that they were “bad” wines (I can honestly say that I think the Fay and the Insignia were beautiful) but from what I remember I disliked them for similar reasons. It’s for reasons like these that I am trying to find ways to describe what I like and don’t like. Don’t get me wrong, trying many different things has been extremely fun, but my wallet isn’t so happy.

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You do have to be careful distinguishing between wines you really do not like and wines that need time. Sometimes wines taste too vanilla-y(?) because they are and once some of that oak goes away there is no there there. Other times, the oak just needs time to integrate into the wine and 10 years later the wine is fabulous. I esp. find this to be tricky with Cabernet/Bordeaux. For me, the best way to increase the odds of telling the difference is track record.

I must say I think there is too much emphasis on oak in distinguishing between more modern wines and more traditional wines and people ignore too many other factors.

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Modern. Consulting winemaker in Mercedes. Cabernet picked at 27 brix, micro oxygenated and in 100% new oak.

Traditional. Owner on tractor.

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One of those may offer some degree of character.

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I didn’t really like Caymus, Insignia, Stag’s Leap Fay, Mondavi Oakville, Orin Swift Palermo and others along the same line. I am not saying that they are all the same, nor am I saying that they were “bad” wines (I can honestly say that I think the Fay and the Insignia were beautiful) but from what I remember I disliked them for similar reasons.

You’re right - they’re not all the same and they’re all well-made and you’re figuring out what you like and why.

It’s really a smart way to learn about wine IMO, rather than taking a class or reading about what you’re supposed to like.

And Howard makes a really good point - eventually you’ll figure out which wines really just need time. On your list, there are some wines I wouldn’t drink and others that are pretty good, especially with time. It may be that you’re just not a fan of ripe Cabernet Sauvignon. That’s OK - you can go through life without ever drinking another Cab and be perfectly happy.

Some of those wines have a bit of a menthol note, which I hate. They all have a good slug of oak, although in some it integrates with time. The Insignia has always been one of the most plush. It was a blend of different vineyards and varieties although these days it’s all estate fruit. The Fay might be the most singular, but it’s clearly a Napa Cab. Keep trying them - even within the category there are many different kinds of wine.

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+10. [rofl.gif]

PS. Gulfstream not Merc, shurely?

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I almost felt like the insignia was a mocha smoothie with some fruit (in a good way?). But it was just too much for me. After the first few sips I was getting tired of it.

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I am not sure about Insignia. It is a wine that aged wonderfully in vintages from the 70s and 80s, but it seems to me to be made in a style more recently that is, well, just what you said. I lost confidence in the ability of the Insignia I had to age the way older vintages did and decided to sell all my Insignia about a year and a half ago.

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I love these 2 distinctions. I am sure their are limitations and tons of exceptions, but I think the beauty of traditional wine is that you experience a dive into these unique regions & cultures, highlighting the pairings & terroirs that are the reason that the particular wine evolved and survived in the first place.

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This is an interesting discussion, in so far as any discussion of modern vs traditional should surely be anchored in actual evolutions in winemaking practice! Whereas most of the definitions we have here are anchored in wine style, to the extent that they could be in most cases substituted for “New World” vs “Old World”, or indeed pretty much “ripe and oaky” vs “less ripe and less oaky”.

So let’s look at some evolutions in winemaking post-1945:

  • sterile filtration
  • very effective temperature control, especially cooling (people were already circulating hot air in pipes in the bottom of fermentation vats in the 1850s, so temperature control per se is not entirely modern)
  • efficient mechanical pumps
  • large stainless steel tanks
  • centrifuges
  • extraction and clarification enzymes
  • carbonic maceration (every 19th-century enology book agrees on one thing: you must crush all grapes)
  • playing around with maceration duration, including heated post-fermentation macerations, cold / sulfured pre-fermentation macerations etc
  • a trend towards less racking
  • a trend towards shorter élevage
  • a trend towards less or no fining for red wine
  • reverse osmosis, vacuum distillation and other concentrating techniques
  • playing around with the timing of malolactic fermentation, especially delaying it by sulfur / cooling the cellar
  • we can’t include oak chips or added tannins as these have been around since at least the 19th century
  • we can’t include destemmers because these have also been around, manual and mechanical, for a very long time, and in 1861 Guyot was writing that the Burgundians are beginning to destem less and less
  • and we certainly can’t include new oak barrels, because those have been around a long time: what we could include is using 200% new oak, as some producers played around with in the past and even today, as to a 19th-century perspective that would have been an aberration
  • I also wouldn’t include sorting, as the best estates sorted very meticulously both in the vineyards and winery historically: the wicker baskets used at harvest were shallow to facilitate sorting.

And some (of many) viticultural evolutions:

  • clonal selections
  • in Burgundy and Bordeaux, the use of over-row tractors necessitating hedging of canopies comparatively low
  • chemical herbicides and other agrochemicals
  • an ensuing trend towards higher yields and higher average cluster weight, which begins to be reversed at last, at least by top producers
  • in New World regions of course we have all sorts of new ways of managing canopies etc, in traditional French regions not so much until very recently (though even in Burgundy in e.g. the Hautes-Côtes people have planted at lower densities, with bigger vines, and even tried out the lyre system)
  • picking at more advanced maturity (though again, there were producers who picked very late in the 19th century, just read Duvault Blochet’s pamphlet) from the 1990s on

Neither of these lists pretend to be remotely exclusive, but it’s a starting point.

So if we ground our discussion in actual techniques rather than aesthetics, we derive some interesting conclusions. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, for example, is very traditional; yet, since 1980, when it has been possible, they have matured their wines without racking, a decidedly modern technique. The tradition in France in the 19th century was a first racking in the New Year after the vintage, followed by egg white fining and racking twice a year for the duration of élevage.

People think of Roumier as a very traditional domaine, but Christophe uses temperature control to retard malolactic fermentation, and has played around with extraction enzymes for quite a bit of his career. And again, these are quite “modern” techniques.

Similarly, the Bordeaux first growths, who used to mature the wines for four years in barrels with regular racking and fining, now bottle after two years with much less racking and fining. And they’re picking fruit that is quite a bit riper, too. They also rack to tank and bottle with a bottling line instead of bottling barrel by barrel (there are photos of Lafite being bottled direct from the barrel in the 1960s, if anyone doubts me).

Even a super-traditional producer such as Coche-Dury racks to a tank to homogenize the wines after malolactic fermentation before returning them to barrel, rather than racking barrel to barrel, and this is a “modern” technique (that makes the wines better!).

So we arrive at the conclusion that most wines today are, to some extent, modern (it might be better to say contemporary), even if the wines remain anchored in a traditional, recognizable aesthetic. The truly “traditional” producers are very rare, people like Henri Bonneau, who really didn’t change anything (though even Henri used to send samples to the lab).

This may seem a bit pedantic, but my point is that “modern” can’t really be used as a proxy for “ripe and oaky” without somewhat abusing the word. There have been so many technical changes, some good and some bad, over the last 80 years, that I don’t think it’s immensely helpful to talk about them this way, at least with regards to the major French wine regions. Now in Piemonte, when there was a big stylistic shift at a lot of addresses, all at the same time, it makes plenty of sense. But I don’t think you can export that very simple polarity of modern vs traditional to many other regions, and certainly not Bordeaux and Burgundy.

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All of the above is useful information and an important insight. But, with regard to the last paragraph, as in art and literary criticism, the terms “traditional” and “modern” are as much terms describing style as they are names of chronological periods. And, like those terms, the wine terms, while imprecise and capable of distortion, do have discernible and useful meanings. It would be a shame to lose them in the service of a precision that serves other purposes.

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Great post as usual by William. I agree that “modern” is the wrong word. People use it to describe a style, which as Jonathan points out, is confusing - and in my opinion, wrong anyway, since the period when that style was in fashion came and went some time ago.

With the rise of organic producers plus the move towards greater freshness and less alcohol, those “modern” wines just taste old fashioned to me. Is this new tendency a return to an old style or the start of something new? Personally I think it’s the latter, which makes the whole mod/trad debate irrelevant.

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Well, the first “rubes” were the Dutch. And Haut Brion. All outsiders.

But Greg’s overview is pretty much spot on, you should bone up on wine history where French wines were traditionally not that good until foreigners stepped in and taught them how. Hell, the Dutch even drained the swamps to create and plant what is today known as “Bordeaux”. As usual, incessant marketing and French whitewashing/distortion of historical facts seem to be working, sadly.

And, BTW, what is today’s Cabernet Sauv driven Bordeaux is really not older than first Napa plantings, Cab being a relatively “recent” variety. Back then, prior to phylloxera decimating Bordeaux vineyards, it was mostly planted to Malbec (dominant grape), it was only post wholesale re-planting that “Bordeaux” used Cab as its main component, well, on the left bank. Cab was planted in Napa and France at about same time, doesn’t matter what the marketers claim or want you to believe, fact remains. Until the Dutch stepped in French wines were considered some of the worst in Europe. Fact. Based on still available invoices from centuries back.

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To me, the list should be reversed. Modern winemaking is traditional winemaking.

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Up to a point. If you read early 19th-century French winemaking texts, almost everything is stuff we would recognize today. They even had a good practical understanding of malolactic, calling it “latent fermentation” or “second fermentation”, even if they didn’t know what was causing it. They are insistent on the necessity of cleaning, sulfuring, scrubbing, boiling, or sterilizing with alcohol anything that touches the wine: no doubt plenty didn’t follow those precepts, but they were understood. The wine trade beyond regions of origin was also rather more advanced than Greg allows. Remember that Jefferson was buying Hermitage, Claret and Meursault to drink in the United States, after all.

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I also think we have to distinguish between a gradual change in style as a result of climate change and an over-abundance of warmer vintages since about 2000. While hot vintages result in riper, fruitier, higher-alcohol wines, these are not the result of modern wine making. (This is a similar point to the prior posts saying that we have to distinguish “wine style” from the wine making techniques).

Separately, I would note an obsessive focus on cleanliness as a “modern” wine making technique. Thirty years ago, flaws such as brett were often treated as character or “terroir” so long as they didn’t completely overwhelm the wine (and, in the case of certain wines–e.g. CdP and Bandol–even when they DID overwhelm the wine). Especially in Bandol (and Beaucastel!!), complaints of brett used to be routinely be dismissed as “just the character of Mourvedre”…

Some of the very old-school producers maintained facilities that were clearly NOT terribly clean (anyone ever visit Pradeaux in Bandol circa 2000)? In more recent years, some have “bemoaned” the tendency of certain producers (e.g., Domaine Tempier, post 2004) to have begun producing overly-clean and “less interesting” and “more modern” wines. I’m convinced that some of this is not due to modernist winemaking techniques so much as a more modern approach to clean, sterile facilities.

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John,

I think you’re right to mention flaws, particularly Brett, in this discussion. There may be a tendency for producers who identify as traditional to show noticeable levels of Brett, but it’s important also to note that there is no necessary connection between the two. I love traditional winemaking but I hate Brett.

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Does anyone have a good example of a winemaker who changed nothing other than implementing quality cleanliness practices over a year or multi-year period and is now perceived as “modern?” While I see the merits of and admit little credibility to counter the premise that “modern” can be correlated with “not unclean anymore,” my guess is that dramatic shifts in attention to cleanliness are most often only a subset of the overall process changes implemented.

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