Wino Wrestling Federation #12: WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT “OLD WORLD” & “NEW WORLD”
A week or two after I started working at Ro Sham Beaux, someone asked me if I preferred “Old World” or “New World” wines. I guessed that they were going to judge me based on my answer, and I sensed that they were “Old World” connoisseurs themselves. My mind first went to Craig Haarmeyer’s Wirz Riesling, Aaron and Cara Mockrish’s (of Frenchtown Farms) Indigeaux, and Dani Rozman’s (of La Onda) Aguafiestas, three bottles I’d been lucky enough to sample in those first few weeks on the job. All local, subtle, complex, and beautiful.
And it’s not that I don’t like European wines–not at all. It’s just that something about the binary terminology of “Old World” and “New World” had a suffocating ring to it. And these wines from Northern California that I was coming to love were really astounding to me in terms of their nuance and romance.
I didn’t grow up in a household with wine on the table, so I entered my wine education with a complete beginner’s mind. When I first started working at Ro, someone asked me for a Chardonnay, and we didn’t have one by the glass. My knowledge of wine was so limited that I couldn’t even direct them to something comparable because I didn’t know what Chardonnay tastes like.
But it’s been almost a year now, and I’m starting to get the hang of things. I’m learning to trust my senses, follow my preferences, and do my research. I’m extremely privileged in this sense. My introduction to wine has been pretty plush. I’m getting to taste a huge range of high quality, low intervention wines from around the world. I’ve met winemakers, tasted with them in their cellars, befriended sales reps, harvested grapes, and even begun to learn how to make wine myself.
We are approaching our one year anniversary as a business and as a wine club, and I’m returning to the theme that we started with for our first WWF club theme: “Old World” and “New World.” This month, we’re going to take a look at whether or not this terminology is as relevant or useful as it was once thought to be.
James Sligh is a Brooklyn-based sommelier, writer, and educator. (Check out his project, The Children's Atlas of Wine for remote classes, a library of his writing, and his hand drawn maps of wine regions.) In his article for Punch, titled “The Myth of ‘Old World’ Wine,” Sligh warns against relying on these traditionally held distinctions as fact. Sligh writes: “As wine professionals, we’re trained to carve up the world into two parts: the Old and the New. Europe on one side and North America and the entire Southern Hemisphere on the other. Wine, in this telling, has an ancestral home, and one can taste the difference. Old World wines are more mineral, more complex, lower in alcohol, higher in acid, have a sense of place. “New World” wines are defined mostly by their lack—of history, of minerality, of tradition.”
These Californian wines that I love so much (Clos Saron, Arquils, Caleb Leisure, just to name a few more…) are stylistically aligned with what we’ve been traditionally taught to think of as being “Old World” characteristics. They are terroir-driven, with healthy acidity: hardly juicy alcohol bombs.
It’s true that the history of winemaking has been dominated by western Europeans, but that’s not the whole story.
Sligh writes: “I want to suggest that what we think of as wine “tradition” is more of a selective misremembering than an unbroken chain. Europe was once one of wine’s “new worlds,” and plenty of its “traditional” practices have existed for less than a century in many cases, with alternatives having been edited out or deliberately abandoned. Likewise, the “New World” itself is older than we think, full of lost folkways that provide alternative paths for wine’s future … Wine up until this point had already belonged to the Mediterranean world for thousands of years. It was farmed and traded by Egyptians and Phoenicians, Greeks and Persians. It was aged in clay, cut with seawater or doctored with lead, mixed with honey and herbs, used for medicine and to talk to gods.”
So this notion of the “Old World” tradition that Bordeaux geeks, wine educators, and even the Court of Master Sommeliers center their standards of taste around is a narrow view of the history of wine and winemaking. It’s just one of many “traditions” in wine across time and space. Sligh notes that “...it wasn’t until 1935 that the system people are usually referring to when they talk about “Old World” tradition was enshrined in law. The Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée laws regulated France’s most well-established wine regions, dictating where Burgundy begins and ends, assuring that its red wine is made from pinot noir, setting a minimum alcohol and maximum yield.”
This “Old World” as we think of it today has been constructed fairly recently. If we are doing the work in our own lives to undo our colonialist programming, doesn’t it follow that we should also rethink our language around wine?
Sligh concludes: “Tradition can be, and has been, remade.” He says a new tradition of farming and winemaking “...can mean keeping pesticides out of watersheds, cultivating soil microbiomes and treating vineyard workers like human beings. It doesn’t have to mean barring women from entering a cellar where wine is fermenting, or looking with suspicion on someone who wasn’t born in the village.” That’s a kind of tradition I’m happy to participate in.
-Kelly
Flawless Wine: A podcast about wine flaws and the people who love them….or don’t.
Presented by Disgorgeous.
In their second episode, “Oxidative or Oxidated,” hosts Kenneth Crum & Miguel de Leon sit down with Zwann Grays, Wine Director of Olmsted and Maison Yaki. They discuss the “Old World, New World” framework and consider how useful it is today.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/flawless-wine-a-podcast-about-wine-flaws-and-the/id1588630427
Miguel de Leon How comfortable are you with “New World, Old World” as a distinction? Because I’m trying to shy away from that because it centers a place rather than an experience.
Zwann Grays It’s a gauge, a barometer.
MDL It was a useful term to an extent up until it wasn’t. Like, I don’t list anything geographically on my menu.
ZG And there you go. So you’re like, it’s wine. I don’t care where you came from, how you was raised, who raised you, how you was drinking wine at 6 years old, I don’t give a fuck. I am here to present you this list, and here’s what’s on it. So, people can be like “Oh, I don’t understand anything on here. It’s like, you don’t have to. We’re here for you. What are you looking for?
MDL Do you think that’s still a useful distinction for customers?
ZG I think it 100% is, it’s very useful.
MDL Because where do we draw the line then, for “New World.” What’s “New World?”
ZG “New World” I think is still “New World”. I think “New World” hasn’t changed.
MDL So what is that though? To me, whenever people say “New World,” it’s like here’s America, here’s South America, South Africa, here’s Australia. That’s a big chunk of place that’s not Europe. To me when we say “Old World,” it’s like: here’s all of Western Europe, here’s a little bit of Austria, here’s a little bit of Greece, and maybe that’s it. We discount this huge chunk, Georgia for example. This never got considered “Old World” wine, up until maybe very recently, and again, to look at the links of the Silk Road for example, is Israeli wine Old World? Is Turkish wine Old World? What can we consider? Where do we draw the line? Where do we stop that?
ZG It is still Old World.
*They open a new bottle of wine.*
ZG I think one thing though, that’s for sure--Old World is Old World. And Old World is “old river” us. We can sit here, we are wine professionals, okay. We know “New World” from “Old World.” And we talk about–
MDL Right, but I always want to question framing. Because framework is like, really important in terms of how we move forward in terms of the conversation.
ZG I don’t think it changes.
MDL You’re right, and I think that it’s time that the frame can actually just get obliterated because it’s outlived its usefulness, like in terms of things like climate change, in terms of things like–
ZG Oh, okay. Got it. Okay, then how does it look now? Now we say, oh, this is not “Old World,” now?
MDL Yeah, I mean you can say “It’s from Europe.” I think that that’s a much better geopolitical way to talk about that space without kind of going into this idea like “Why is it old?” “Old for who?” “Why is that new? New for who?”
Kenneth Crum I usually use Old World and New World as a style choice.
MDL Correct. So are there old world wines in California?”
KC Yes.
ZG That’s true
MDL Okay, so you see how much of a big leap that is for someone coming into the space being like “I thought California was in the New World. I mean, we’re always basing it, like there’s always an imperialistic bounding of the theory.
KC I completely understand, and I always stand behind questioning what we’re using as the standard ways of describing wines, but I always use it to make it easier to decode different things. Like, if I’m saying “Oh this Matt Taylor Pinot Noir is in the “Old World” style, Loire Valley style…”
MDL Style, fine. Sure, I get that. But I think, even just the distinction of “style” has become so much more individualistic, especially coming from domestic winemakers, right? You can find people who are making, I mean like Matt Rorick is a good iconoclastic figure for individualistic winemaking in California.
KC How often do you hear that, that term?
MDL Old World New World?
KC Yeah
MDL I mean enough from consumers, clearly. But I think that part of the divide is like… I mean we’re three brown people from New York City who maybe actively in their circles try to remove themselves from something like that. So that’s a big question from me. When we try to move ahead in that space, how do we consider that distinction when it’s like, we’ve never been included in the Old World. How can I become a little bit more engaged or involved with this idea of New World Old World dichotomies when those things actually don’t exist. Right? When Zwann says “My come up in wine and the things that I call home for wine are Greece and Georgia," right?
ZG Laughs
MDL From what she said, those are in “the Old World.” But when she steps into a place like Greece or Georgia, she feels like it’s fuckin’ the New World.”
And last but not least… THE WINES
Wavy X Bardos 2021 - a collab for the ages.
Syrah & feral apples
Sonoma, CA
Organic farming
Spontaneous fermentation
Unfined/Unfiltered
11.5% ABV
Distributed by Sylvester Rovine
A little bit about Bardos–we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: their ciders are magic, and we love their whole project. Check out their website.
They say: “We create Bardos Cider in as natural a practice as we know possible. Simply put, we either glean our apples from derelict orchards in West Sonoma County or work with local farmers who steward the old orchards of a bygone California—no more, no less. Older trees that are no longer cultivated, their struggle and abandonment, bear fruit with more personality and complexity. Additionally, we add in wild seedling of Indian, or old-world apples whenever possible. The majority of the varietals and sports we incorporate have been developed by historic characters like Luther Burbank, Felix Gillet, Albert Etter, for the specific climate of Northern California.
During the winemaking process, we intervene as little as possible. We press the cider, sometimes leave it to macerate on its own skins and age it in neutral oak or steel. After bottling, we leave it to condition on its own naturally-occurring lees. The product is unfiltered and non-disgorged.
Our branding speaks to the diverse narratives present in the land and life that comprises the area in which we make the cider.
The fruit is grown on the unceded land of the Southern Pomo and Coastal Miwok and the wine is made with the utmost respect for the people of Graton Rancheria and acknowledgment of Elders, past, present, and emerging.”
And Wavy Wines!
They say: “Wavy Wines started as a friendly conversation between Eliot Kessel and Jude Zasadzki while celebrating Eliot’s daughter's birthday in 2019. We were drinking natural wines from all over the world trying to fathom how we could start a project that begins to resemble these styles of ‘Vin de Soif’. Easy summer wines were top priority.
After many conversations about where we should start, we came across an affordable source of Pinot Gris from an organic vineyard in Chico, California. It was pretty set in stone that we were going to make a skin contact/ramato style of wine. Coupled with a little bit of Chardonnay from Scribe Estate Vineyard we were in business.
With finances being tight we decided to take a chance on making a Piquette from the same grapes. The process to which we got there really marked a pivotal moment in Wavy. We will always recycle our grapes, and that will always change with whatever we source for that year.”
As a Wavy X Bardos collaboration, they write: "A Sonoma County story of old feral apples and organically-farmed grapes united by the friends and families of Wavy and Bardos. Made with love, we are excited to share a soifey, fresh, sparkling red wine, where the richness and spice of Syrah meet the juicy-dryness of natural California cider.
Our Syrah was organically farmed by grape cowboy angels Dave Rothchild and Dan Marioni in Carneros. The apples, mainly Pink Pearl, Jonathan and Roxbury Russet, were hand-gleaned by Wavy and Bardos from derelict trees that have been surviving on their own for generations in the Goldridge sandy-loam of West Sonoma County."
Our Take:
“A long time lost in the covid sea’s lull, yearning for the arrival of the Bardos x Wavy coferment. It’s here! The euphorias arise. The bottle popped, bubbling goodness begins. The wind has now picked up, crisp air matched with a warm gentle overhead sun; the sails are now filled as well as our glasses. The bubbling continues, the first sip as bright as the sun, a pleasing brightness. The high spirited juiciness revitalizes the wearied soul and continues to sparkle on the tongue. Tastes of sour green apple turned to the sweet grape, we grab ahold of the metallic mast upon swallowing the cofermented juice and gaze fore along the vast sea horizon. Sights of land ahead, leaving this motionless sea calls for another glass and a cheers with the glistening sun.”
-Justin (the newest member of our team!)
Vignoble Dinocheau 2020 Pineau d'Aunis Rouge
"Located on the slopes of Cher, Vignoble Dinocheau was founded by the great-great-great grandfather of Laurence and Fabien Dinocheau. Laurence and Fabien took over the estate in 2006 and it now covers 13 hectares in both Chenonceaux and Touraine AOPs. They aim for minimal intervention in the vineyard and practice sustainable farming." - Zev Rovine
They say: “Our plots reflect Touraine and its diversity of grape varieties, including the oldest, thus offering a complete range of white , red , rosé and sparkling wines.
The soils, clay-limestone and clay with flint, on a tufa subsoil, make it possible to reach optimal maturities. They lend themselves to the production of wines that are both supple and fruity, round and full-bodied, with a fine minerality depending on the grape variety.
Our cultural policy incorporates natural grass cover as well as minimal intervention in the vines. We thus aim for a sustainable development of our vineyard, where each decision must preserve the balance between tradition and innovation.”
Several objectives:
– limit the use of weed killer
– limit soil erosion
– encourage the rooting of vine stocks
– preserve the fauna and flora at soil level
Our Take:
"A beautiful ruby color that skews almost lavender in evening light. It smells like laying down on hot granite at the Yuba River. Refreshing, light-bodied, gentle-yet-present acidity, with a good grip of tannin. This wine is like peeling a ruby red grapefruit and getting the oils all over your hands. It's like picking rainier cherries and then taking a nap under the tree. It's strawberries and raspberries and blueberries. If you haven't had the Loire darling that is Pineau d'Aunis before, this is a perfect introduction. And if you find that you really love its graphite, grapefruit, pepper, and macerated strawberry character, definitely snag a bottle of Ariane Lesné's Pineau d'Aunis from Domaine de Montrieux! We have it on the shelf right now."
-Kelly
Aslina Wines 2020 Chardonnay
Chardonnay grapes were hand-picked at optimum ripeness at the end of February 2019. The grapes come from Stellenbosch and Elgin. The grapes from Stellenbosch were fermented in tank and the grapes from Elgin in second-fill barrels. 25% of the wine was then aged in second-fill barrels for 10 months while the remainder rested in the tank sur-lie.
A complex Chardonnay, fresh, round and soft. Partial wooding gives this wine the edge and to show the beautiful, tropical fruit and limey character. Slight buttery notes showing on the palate with a balance of acidity, fruit and oak.
Ntsiki grew up in Mahlabathini, a rural village in Kwazulu Natal, and matriculated from high school in 1996. Having spent a year as a domestic worker, she was awarded a scholarship to study winemaking in 1999. She graduated in 2003 with a BSc in Agriculture (Viticulture and Oenology) at Stellenbosch University and joined boutique winery Stellekaya Wines the following year.
Ntsiki’s ambition to create her own wines grew following a collaboration with Californian winemaker, Helen Kiplinger, as part of Mika Bulmash’s Wine for the World initiative. In addition, she has consulted in France, making wine under Winemakers Collection in Bordeaux. She sits on the board of directors for the Pinotage Youth Development Academy, which provides technical training and personal development for young South Africans in the Cape Winelands, preparing them for work in the wine industry. The program offers them the unique opportunity to emulate her own considerable success.
Our Take:
"My first ever South African wine! When I first tried it, it was way too cold. Best enjoyed at a slightly warmer temperature--take it out of the refrigerator for 20 minutes or so before sipping. Or let it slowly warm in your glass, and notice how the nose goes from baarely there, to bright, tropical and citrusy.
It has notes of apple pie, lemon peel, lemon juice, with juuuust a touch of oak. I don't typically drink wine and think "dang, I could really go for some fish right now," but this bottle had that effect on me. Grilled fish would be perfect with it.
Bridget Jones would drink this and love it. Your Chardonnay-loving family members will, too.
-Kelly
Domaine des Roches Neuves, Saumur-Champigny “Cuvée Domaine” (2020)
Producer: Thierry Germain
Region: Loire Valley, France
Grape: Cabernet Franc
Appellation: Saumur-Champigny
Cabernet Franc - 4-70 years - Sand, Clay, Tuffeau Limestone
100% de-stemmed, fermentation in stainless steel tank for 8 to 10 days
Light pumpovers during fermentation—meant to infuse the grapes not extract them
Aged in stainless steel and wood tanks, on fine lees, without sulfur, for 3 to 4 months
Communes: Chaintres de Varrains and Saumur
Hand harvested, sorted by hand at the winery
Natural fermentation for all wines
No new oak barrels or tanks of any size
All still wines aged in bottle for 6 months
All vineyards are certified biodynamic by Biodyvin except the Clos de L’Ecotard which is certified organic by Ecocert (and is also worked biodynamically)
Thierry Germain’s domaine, Roches Neuves, whose vineyards are planted in the Saumur (Blanc) and Saumur-Champigny (Rouge) appellations, has rightfully become one of the greatest examples of high achievement in biodynamic vine growing in France. We put him up there with the greats: Abbatucci in Corsica, Ganevat in the Jura, Ostertag in Alsace. His total dedication to site specific wines produced from Cabernet Franc and Chenin Blanc, his “parcellaires,” has produced some of the most exciting wines in the Loire Valley today.
Thierry relocated to the Loire from Bordeaux in the early 1990s, and soon fell under the influence of his spiritual father, Charly Foucault of Clos Rougeard. Thierry would ultimately convert his entire domaine to biodynamic viticulture, which was the equivalent of his wine epiphany. Listening and observing his plants, allowing them to guide him, revolutionized his way of thinking. Thierry harvests on the relatively early side to preserve fresh, vibrant fruit. His goal is to produce Cabernet with purity, finesse, and drinkability, while avoiding rusticity, vegetal character, and hard tannins. When it comes to his Chenin, he makes bone dry, high acid, mineral wines that drink like Chablis young and take on weight slowly over time. Aging takes place in large oval foudres (for the whites) and round foudres and demi-muids (for the reds) in Thierry’s frigid tuffeau cellars below his winery in Varrains. His incredibly diverse terroirs are translated with utter clarity and precision.
Our Take:
"Into the glass, the color is garnet with a thin neon halo resting at its edge. A quick swirl and a sniff reveal ferrous, leathery notes combined with raspberry, stewed strawberries, and burnt sugar. The first thing out of my mouth was “blood and cupcakes” and yes I did think to omit that utterance yet even with that I find the smell extremely pleasant. The mouthfeel is heavy velvet balanced with a cut of electric acidity. The flavors move legato from plum and blackberry transitioning to olive and violets then a finale of bell pepper and juniper. It feels ceremonial as if it’s meant to be drunk with some sacrificial purpose, I’m talking altars, shrouds, candles and bejeweled ritualistically filled chalices. Frankly, I have underdressed for the occasion as I am just wearing sweats and a hoodie but my hood is up and I lit a candle."
-Addam
