Traditional vs. Modern wine making? Please explain!

I’ve seen some posts on Wine Talk debating the merits of traditional vs. modern wine making techniques. Can someone explain the difference? In other words, what were wine makers doing 30+ years ago that they aren’t doing today?

Are wine makers today taking advantage of technological advancements that weren’t available previously? If so, what are they? Are grapes being grown differently today? If so, how? Lastly, why would wine makers change their process for making wine in the first place? So they can get a better Parker rating?

I fully appreciate that different wine regions make wine differently. If someone wants to provide an answer using a specific wine region, I’m OK with that.

I don’t know that firm definitions exist. When I read modern or international I assume that means that the wine appears to have been picked at higher brix and has more new oak. The acid will be lower and the fruit profile will be more black fruit than red fruit and if really left to hang could tend to raisin or stewed fruit flavors. The body will have a heavier mouthfeel.

Traditional would be the opposite. Less oak, more acid, red fruit and maybe a touch of herb/tobacco/green. These wines generally show best with food while the modern wines often show best alone.

The reason for modern wines is part sales part weather. Parker and Laube and I am sure other praised the upfront fruit of modern wines, gave them high scores and many wineries followed. But weather plays a part as well. It’s a challenge to make something that is not a big, fruit forward wine in some areas whereas in other areas it would be a challenge to make one.

Definitely when people talk about “Parkerized” wines, that means lots of ripeness, low acidity, lush fruit, and toasty oak.

There are a lot of levels of traditional vs. modern, and even what we might consider traditional hasn’t actually been done that way for very long.

For me “modern” means sterilizing the must, then inoculating with a commercial yeast, adjusting sugar and pH using water and acid additions. aging in new barrels or stainless, and in the end sterile filtering and cold stabilizing the wine. This is probably a 20-year old version of modern which is where my brain happens to be stuck. There is an even more modern approach which involves deconstructing the wine using RO or spinning cones, then putting the parts back together in carefully chosen ratios to hit a certain flavor profile.

“Traditional” involves fermentation using native yeasts, maybe foot-crushing, maybe some fining, aging in old/neutral and maybe fairly large barrels, and bottling unfiltered.

I prefer to take a broader view:

Traditional: Those producers who assumed that the end user would A) age the wine for a considerable period (assuming that the winery didn’t do this themselves, see old Rioja) and B) consume it with appropriate food, made wines that rewarded that and, hence, were renown in the Brit / Euro press.

Modern: Those producers who assumed that the end user would open a bottle within a month of getting it and likely taste it with / against other wines and without the “distraction” of food, made wines that rewarded THAT and then got big American press as “beverage wines”.

I recently heard traditional wine making described as wine making methods that have been passed on through generations and are based on what worked in the past. In contrast moderm wine making methods are derived from a more scientific approach.

To an extent the answer depends on the region in question. The obvious but useless answer is traditionalists make wine in pretty much the same way previous generation(s) made it, whilst modernists are introducing new or different techniques.

Piemonte is perhaps a good region to discuss as it has been widely debated and although the full spectrum exists, the individual elements seem to fit neatly into one camp or the other e.g. Traditional: Extended maceration without mechanical aids, ageing in large mainly old slavonian oak botti. This can give wines wirh little oak taste, where tannins are likely to be very firm vs. fruit richness. Ageing will soften the tannins and with luck the fruit then re-emerges much more interesting/complex/ethereal.
Modernist: Reduced maceration, but using rotofermenters to accelerate extraction and increase fruit richness. Ageing in smaller oak such as barriques, often using newer french oak. This can make the wines more approachable in youth, and the oak will be more noticeable on the palate. Ageing still a little unknown, but the early modernist wines must have 2-3 decades on them now, so there will be answers out there.

For a while the debate was a fierce one, but seems to have settled down, with many more operating in the middle ground.

I know there are similar trad vs. modern in both red and white rioja. Elsewhere Australia has veered between high and low alcohol, depending on critical and local opinion, so it is a little harder to say what is modern and what is traditional. Perhaps they are all modernists or revivalists?

Traditional = My dad did it this way. Modern = My Dad never made wine.

This is generally how I view it. Everyone else makes a good point, but if I had to choose a bucket for a wine these would be the markers I’d use to place it. It certainly does depend on region though.

I think modern winemakers want to make the best wine they can. I think saying sales is driving that is disingenuous. You may not like the style, but very few of the winemakers that people on this BB care about are driven by sales.

Traditional winemakers used what they learned from their parent or mentor. After that though, it get blurry. I think modern winemakers use what they learned in school (often UC Davis) and try to apply that to their winemaking. Yes, that often includes letting the grapes hang later so they get a bit more mature (riper). I don’t think more new oak is true though. Some do, some don’t. What might be more true is the type of vessel used. Heck, steel tanks might be considered modern although they have been around a long time by now. Concrete eggs are very modern and certainly don’t impart oak. What about amphorae? I guess that’s traditional (7000 years) except no one outside Georgia really used them for thousands of years until the last twenty years. Using that modern vs. traditional is what many people used to say about new world vs. old world ten years ago until the old world wines started to get riper and some new world wines started to want less alcohol.

For a great microcosm, look at Barolo. Twenty years ago this was a clear debate. Then many started to move to the center. Does that make the extremes on either side “traditional”?

If I had to use the terms, I would look region by region and see if the general styles are the same as they were 40 years ago. But, guess what, they aren’t. Even the old school guys, and every region has some, are always learning, always trying to improve.

All good points and very true, especially regarding Barolo.

Loren - We spoke to Juan Muga about the use of oak in Rioja and stylistic changes, and he was refreshingly honest about the influence of critics on the wines in that region, and the importance of sales.

I am not taking a side here, just reporting what one producer told us for our “Ask a Winemaker” series because I think it informs the original question in this thread.

Here is the video: The influence of Wine Critics on Rioja: Juan Muga talks new oak and more. - YouTube

Fair enough Damien. That is an interesting take from him. Clearly, he was responding to market pressures in the late 1980’s, correct? I am a fan of Muga although their higher end wines have too much oak for me. :wink: I wonder where he comes out today (I will watch the rest of those clips when I have a moment). I am not saying that there are not those who make wines for the market. I think that is especially true in larger wineries. I think the majority of the wines discussed on this BB are not in the camp however. Most winemakers I know, and I guess those tend to be in the US, make wines that they like to drink.

Loren - I believe he was talking about the mid nineties, and we filmed early this year, so I don’t suppose his pov has changed much.

I can’t agree or disagree about other winemakers on this forum as I am new, but also because, in my experience, every winemaker’s choices are influenced by a unique set of constraints, options and desires. I’ve had conversations in tiny cellars in Chinon about what sort of wines are well received in Chicago, not because the winemaker wanted to make a wine for the market, per se, but because he valued my opinion about how the wines are received and what I was tasting. Did my answer sway his thinking? I hope not too much. It was likely one data point among hundreds but it was one that comes from an important market for that small producer.

I suspect that shifts in winemaking styles are progressive most of the time.

Without sales, wineries go out of business so of course they care about sales. How many wineries that we have talked about on here no longer exist? Garetson comes immediately to mine along with Eaglepoint Ranch. I am sure there are others.

As to if sales drive a winery to produce wine in a style that they don’t think is the best, I recall my own experience working for a winery in the 1990s. That winery made a semi-sweet muscat that was produced for no other reason than sales. We sold more of that than all the other wines combined and without it would be out if business. Both the owner and winemaker acknowledged that they made that wine so that they could make the others which was why they were in the business.

I am sure that many of the modern winemakers are just making what they believe is the best wine and agree that this is likely the case for many of the wineries discussed here. That is the way it should be. But I also believe that much of the increase in brix at harvest and percentage of new oak across wines in general is score driven which provides needed positive press which help with sales and justify higher prices.

The problem is that we are discussing motives for thousands of individuals and trying to assign one or two reasons for all of them. These blanket statements are always going to be wrong for a portion of the whole. It’s probably as pointless as discussing why the stock market went up or down in any given day.

I think I know what is meant by traditional winemaking. It is reliance on basic winemaking techniques that have been practiced in that region or with those grapes (in the case of New World) for a long time.

For me it would preclude the use of enzymes, temperature control, designer yeasts, centrifuges, additives such as tannin powder or coloring agents, gelatine, oak chips, cross-flow filters, ion-exchange collumns, manoproteins and pasteurization.

I’m not sure how you define “Modern winemaking”. I guess it’s the use of products or practices that have come about recently.

There is no clear dividing line. Wineries may practice some traditional and some modern techniques. Some new techniques for Natural wines are throwbacks to earlier times (no sulphite for example), or modern, like carbonic maceration or concrete eggs.

From a taste perspective I would expect a traditional wine to be more earthy and dry as opposed to fruity and smooth but again, no clear dividing line.

Jon - curious to hear whether Domaine Treloar follows traditional or modern wine making practices. And is your wine available in the states???

In terms of taste, I’d be curious to get a short list of well known (e.g. readily available) wineries that would be considered ‘traditional’ and those that are considered ‘modern’. I’d like to do some side-by-side tasting and would like some suggested wines to try.

I follow what I state above as Traditional winemaking techniques. My wines are not available in the USA.

The second paragraph is a huge question. YellowTail, Sutter-Home and Blossom Hill and endless other popular brands portray the Modern techniques but so do a lot of wines with high prices and high Parker scores. Michel Rolland consults for many of them. Tradional winemaking is generally practiced by small, independent wineries in Europe. It strays into Natural winemaking but I would argue that extreme Natural is just as much a modern fad as the so-called Parkerised wines.