The ongoing battle between advocates of wines made with international grape varieties in an international style (read flamboyantly fruity and oak-influenced) and admirers of more specialized, often somewhat idiosyncratic wines is sometimes characterized as a conflict between innovation and tradition. Jonathan Nossiter, for example, made a movie (2004’s Mondovino) depicting just that; the writer, Alice Fearing, argues the point all the time; and importers like Kermit Lynch and Neal Rosenthal beat the same drum as a way to rev up sales.
The only problem is that it’s not true.
Wine is very old, but the so-called traditions that these folks want to defend are not. It’s true that indigenous grape varieties like Spain’s Albariño and Mencia, or Italy’s Aglianico and Verdicchio, have been cultivated for centuries. Drinkers all across the globe enjoy wines made from them today. Yet wines made from the same grapes just a generation ago were very different. Frequently oxidized and often infected by bacteria, they tended to taste sour and dirty. It’s not hard to understand why. Until quite recently, such wines had a very limited and often impoverished consumer market, and the vintners responsible for them had little access to scientifically-informed methods of viticulture and oenology. They may have been traditional, but they weren’t very good.
It’s important to remember that Europe’s vineyards were devastated by the phylloxera crisis of the late nineteenth century. Then during the first two-thirds of the twentieth, quantity, not quality, was the name of the game in most grape-growing regions. Only in the past two or three decades, with the introduction of temperature control technology and the expansion of the global wine market, has improved quality become a widely shared goal.
Truly distinctive-tasting wines made with local grapes are for the most part quite recent phenomena. With very few exceptions, they simply did not exist a generation ago. That’s why, with wine, tradition is more often something to lament rather than celebrate. After all, it was in the name of tradition that the Italian authorities insisted on the inclusion of inferior grape varieties in Chianti, just as tradition was long used as an excuse for oxidized wines coming from unhygienic cellars.
None of this is to say that the conflict between internationally-styled and more specialized wines isn’t real. It most definitely is. But this conflict is ultimately not about either tradition or innovation. Instead, it’s at heart a matter of fashion. And as the English playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once noted wryly, “a fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.”
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