Wine Conversations: Old World vs. New World (IV)
The difficulty of excising inaccuracy and exclusion from our vocabularies
When Vicky Hampton introduced our Wine Conversations topic for this month, it sounded like it had the potential to be a bit more contentious than previous themes. However, while the three posts that have been published so far bring out different aspects of the argument, there’s no real disagreement. Vicky concluded that although the terms can serve as stylistic shorthand, there are so many exceptions that they carry very little meaning - and other stylistic markers can easily fill the same function.
Dave Baxter followed up with a deep dive into the mythology that undergirds those terms. We can do better, he argues, by giving people the rich and complex reality of wine rather than oversimplifications.
Finally, Maria Banson gave a sommelier’s perspective around the elimination of Old World and New World terminology from the Court of Master Sommeliers’ tasting grids, and the general broadening of blind tasting language to embrace the aromas and flavors of non-European locations and cultures.
Despite desperately wanting to be oppositional and stir things up around here, I’m afraid I’m going to have to join in the agreeable party. For all the reasons the above posts listed, I don’t have much use for Old World and New World distinctions. The exceptions to the “rules” of what would categorize a wine as Old or New are so abundant that both rules and categories seem just plain inaccurate.
Maria also touched on how harmful and exclusionary this language can be to BIPOC people. For me, even if the categories had consistent, accurate meaning, this alone would be enough reason to strike them from our vocabulary. There’s already too much colonization, erasure, and elitism in wine; I’m not here to continue those trends for any reason, least of all for a tradition based in Eurocentric mythologies.
All that said, here’s the rub: these terms are in my vocabulary, and they’re hard to excise. I work in a winery that is frequently described (often by the staff) as “Old World-inspired.” It’s easy shorthand when a guest asks why our wine is lighter bodied, lower alcohol, more acidic, and less dominated by fruit flavors than other typical wines in our area.
But where the terms really have a firm grip is in the blind tasting flow chart in my mind. When I blind taste, a series of defined questions - the same ones every time, in the same order - help me suss out what I’m dealing with. Each answer discards a set of options and focuses toward another.
One of the questions is, “Old World or New World?”
Sure, I could break it out into component questions, but it’s a set of characteristics that go together, and I’m not trying to create unnecessary complications for myself. It doesn’t even necessarily point me toward what are considered Old World countries of origin, because part of what I’m considering is how it might buck the category. A huge part of tasting wine is being able to talk about it with other people, and I haven’t yet found replacement terms that help me both think about characteristics, and articulate them to others in a way they can easily understand (and that don’t require me to run through a laundry list of related and complementary traits every time I want to discuss it).
Amending our vocabularies is slow, intentional work, so that is what I’m in the process of doing. I’ve shifted to discussing the wines at work as “French-inspired,” which is more accurate anyway, or getting even more specific with comparisons to Bordeaux, Burgundy, or Alsace. With guests, I chat about the stylistic differences in Napa Cabernets - and the commonalities they share because of climate and soil. Old World and New World are easily replaced with terms that make my meaning more clear to people who have a range of experience with wine.
It’s been harder to change my blind tasting flow chart. That question section feels scattered now, when the whole purpose of having a flow chart in your mind is to herd ideas into order. I don’t enjoy mental chaos, especially not in my wine studies, where there is so much information that I need to systematize to remember it all. But it is worthwhile for me to put in the extra work of struggling toward better terms that reflect the whole of the world of wine with greater nuance, accuracy, and inclusion of the diverse people who have made and consumed wine for millennia.
Stay tuned for Kate Reuschel’s perspective later this week! Maybe she’ll be the one to take us all on with a fierce defense of the primacy of Old World wines. Or maybe not! The only way to know for sure is to check it out. In the meantime, drop your thoughts in the comments. Have you found better language to communicate sets of stylistic characteristics? More accurate ways to guide your tasting? Or would you rather we just stuck with the tradition?
This is an interesting part of the question you're exploring here! But while I use the shorthand from time to time for others (so I don't have to wonder if they know what I'm trying to say) I actually don't use it for myself, pretty much at all.
I don't find French and Italian wine similar AT ALL. And I'd mistake a New Zealand Pinot for a German any day of the week. Many Spanish and Portuguese wines I'd mistake for American or South American wines. Same with South Africa. At least if we're talking in broad strokes. I tend to think of similarities and differences in terms of individual countries, and then regions and sub-regons, but never by continent. There's just too much range within any given country, let alone a whole damn continent.