Winemakers are reviving old favourites dating back to the Ancient Greeks
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 barrique-praising, 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. We’ll investigate a few periods of history that are in various states of revival, from the very ancient, such as Georgian amber wines, to wines of a much more recent yesteryear, like Napa Valley classics. Given the sheer diversity of styles that have been in vogue through the millennia, you’re bound to find something that makes someone else’s “old” seem shiny and new to you.
Nectar of the Ancients
While there is still some debate about the origins of wine, most scholars agree that vine domestication dates back to at least 4000BC and probably spread from the area around the Caucasus Mountains (modern-day Georgia) gradually westward, traipsing through Phoenicia (modern-day Lebanon), Greece and Rome before making its way north and west. For an especially exotic holiday meal, why not choose wines that retrace the vine’s ancient steps? However, be prepared to drink a lot of whites, which were generally more prized in antiquity than their red counterparts.
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1. Shalauri Rkatsiteli 2013
The brainchild of an eclectic quartet of local entrepreneurs, this updated take on the classic Georgian qvevri (amphora) wine is made with its flagship rkatseteli grape (just say “R-cats-a-telly”) and has a smoky mandarin peel and boiled ginger nose with waxy, shaggy tannins from time fermenting with the grape skins.