Blast from the Past

In a world fixated on novelty, the wine industry manages time and again to make tradition seem like the hot new thing. Go to any region that once had a raging battle between barriquepraising, fruit-fixated modernists and dusty cellared, terroir-obsessed traditionalists and you’ll find scant producers eager to be lumped into the forward-facing camp.

In Australia and California, young winemakers will talk up their savoury, “traditional”, wines and even European producers with very clean, fruit-focused wines still tout their “traditional” chops. Then there’s the natural wine movement where everything is jumbled up with a pseudo-historical fixation on minimising intervention (as if anything could be more modern than deliberately eschewing available technology for purely philosophical reasons).

So, to celebrate the spring season, here are a few ways to think about “tradition” when it comes to wine.