Why Are We Still Describing Wine As Old World or New World?

If you want to sound like you know more about wine, it's time to drop these outdated terms.

Whether you’re new to wine or your lapels are heavy with pins, you’ve probably heard someone describe a bottle as from the Old or New World. A shorthand used to denote geography and style, it’s one of the most enduring ways that textbooks and bottle shops categorize a topic as wide-reaching as wine.

The terms are primarily used to present a dichotomy. “Old World” wines hail from Western Europe and are believed to have lower alcohol levels as well as deeper ties to the places where their grapes are grown, also known as terroir. So-called New World wines are made anywhere other than Western Europe, and are described as having fruit-forward flavors due to the purportedly clinical ways they’re made. Picture an “Old-World” farmer letting hand-picked grapes naturally ferment in an open-air field with nearby lambs or cool Medieval cellar, while a “New-World” wine scientist drops machine-harvested fruit into stainless steel vats jacketed by refrigeration units.

As tidy and tantalizingly simple as it sounds, the Old vs New World framework is increasingly inaccurate for anyone trying to understand modern wine. It rather haphazardly draws lines around what is and isn’t “old,” and ignores all the ways that factors like climate change, technology, and international trends shape which styles of wine are made where and how.

Simply put, “Old World wine” doesn’t exist anymore — at least not in the way it once did. It’s an archaic schema, and there are so many other, better ways to talk about wine to anyone who’s interested in breaking away from creaky norms.

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One of the most glaring issues with the Old vs New dichotomy is historical inaccuracy. Even if we overlook the generally troublesome, colonialist implications of this framework (and why should we?), we’re still playing fast and loose with European history. For instance, let’s say we adopt the mindset of some European winemakers and define “Old World” as places where Ancient Romans planted vines: France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal. Curiously absent from this list is Greece, which also produced wine during that time, but isn’t presently considered part of wine’s “Old World.” We’re also ignoring recent archeological evidence that the world’s first winemaking equipment was in what we now call Georgia, another country confusingly absent from the “Old World” umbrella.

When Dr. D. Christopher Taylor teaches wine classes at the University of Houston’s Conrad N. Hilton College of Global Hospitality Leadership, he uses these terms as more of a historical touchpoint than a modern-day classification system. “It has to be brought up in context of how wine developed over time, but the notion of being able to describe wine style in terms of Old World versus New World is not relevant in today’s wine marketplace. Especially for new wine consumers … it’s obsolete as a good descriptor to demarcate one style of wine from another.”

Sadly, climate change and how winemakers address its effects is a more relevant way to explore the impacts of geography on winemaking. Take France’s Ministry of Agriculture, which redrew guidelines to permit Bordeaux winemakers to use six new grapes better suited to withstand climate change in 2021. In the coming years, your storied Bordeaux red might contain centuries-old varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, plus a dash of Arinarnoa, a cross between Tannat and Cabernet that was invented less than 70 years ago.

As the earth grows hotter and global technologies advance, winemakers everywhere — including in the so-called Old World — continue to grapple with later harvests, higher alcohol levels, and the need to embrace technology. If temperatures in Southern France climb above 100°Fahrenheit in September, for example, winemakers there must use the climate-controlled storage and jacketed tanks historically associated with their “New World” brethren. “When you’re using good science to make wine, that’s ‘New World style,’” says Taylor.

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Werner Waldboth understands the importance of adaptability all too well. He’s the head of sales and marketing at Abbazia di Novacella, an abbey and winery in Alto Adige, Italy, built in 1142. He explains that temperatures are up by 4°F in the last 30 years, requiring their team to harvest grapes some two to three weeks earlier than in the 1990s. “We don’t have that big diurnal shift anymore, which means we have higher sugar levels in the grapes and higher alcohol levels,” he adds.

These sorts of procedural variations can have a big effect on how the wine in your glass tastes. “We used to keep our yields very low to create structure in the wine, but now we have to keep yields larger to keep alcohol levels low,” Waldboth says. “Winemakers all over the world have to think about these things now.”

Winemakers have to keep global marketability in mind, too. Whether they’re perfecting a red blend in a high-tech California winery, or picking the same varieties their great-great-great-grandparents cultivated in a verdant French valley, most of them need to sell bottles to pay their bills. Consequently, far-flung consumer tastes have affected winemaking styles for generations. Waldboth recalls how, in the 1980s and 90s, winemakers throughout the so-called Old World started making full-bodied, high-alcohol wines — regardless of historical precedent — because that style appealed to American wine critic Robert Parker and the deep-pocketed U.S. consumers who made purchases based on his reviews. Nowadays, many global wine drinkers prefer lighter, low-alcohol wines, so market-minded producers from Lodi to the Loire are changing their styles yet again to appeal to them. Geography isn’t driving those stylistic changes so much as the need to find a market and stay in business.

Sought-after wines aren’t limited to select, hallowed grounds of the “Old World,” either. Plenty of winemakers beyond Western Europe are making nuanced, terroir-driven wines that appeal to the sort of global consumers who previously only paid top-dollar for Burgundies and Bordeaux. That’s why Severine Schlumberger suggests we do away with the Old versus New World framework, and adopt a different system of classification. “There are two ways of making wine, and it isn’t about your location. There’s the farming way of making wine or the industrial way of making wine,” says the seventh-generation wine grower at Domaine Schlumberger in Alsace, France.

She compares agricultural wine to the locally grown fruits and vegetables you might find at a farm stand, whereas industrial wine is akin to bananas flown from massive commodity farms to chain supermarkets. There are no geographic limits to these approaches, meaning that  a French winemaker can produce industrial wine while a Chilean winemaker might devote themselves to agriculturally driven processes. Their methods will shape the character and cellar life of their wines in ways that Schlumberger finds far more meaningful than their addresses. “Today, you can have wine from Australia, Patagonia, and so on that can age. If it’s farmed properly, it can age. If it’s produced in an industrial fashion, it’s not going to keep.”

Of course, Schlumberger’s otherwise entirely reasonable classification system lacks the sheer simplicity offered by the New versus Old World dichotomy, and it would be very difficult for casual wine drinkers to know how one wine is made compared to another. That’s no reason to give up this conversation, though. It just means we have to keep talking.

Regina Jones Jackson, the owner and founder of Corks and Cuvée, a wine shop and consultancy in Conyers, Georgia, often uses the terms New and Old World as a way to tell customers about everything from terroir, to why most French wine labels don’t list a grape variety. Still, she sees the shortcomings of the framework and words themselves. “I can see the fear I strike in people when I use the term ‘Old World,’” she says. “People tend to shy away, they think, ‘Oh, here we go, this is gonna be over my head.’”

Jones Jackson welcomes the chance to come up with new terminology that could make more people feel included. “What we don’t want people to do is shy away from the wine world. The wine heads, they’re going to be here, whether we call it Old World, New World, whatever. “But, as we look around, do we want more people to come to the world of wine?" she asks. "Do we want to be more welcoming? If so, we’ve got to evolve.”

Evolution is necessary to survival — in wine, and in language. If ditching the Old versus New World dichotomy makes you uneasy despite its enduring inaccuracies, ask yourself: Would you rather cling to wine’s mythical past, or try to sustain its long, fruitful future?

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