Old World Wine vs New World Wine

Ancient stone cellars still hold dusty old bottles of wine infused with tradition and mysteriously enticing aromas, but now there appear new flavors made with innovative and youthful expression. France, Italy and Spain, the three largest wine-producing countries in the world, originated and developed the traditional basis for wine-growing and wine making.

Old World styles are usually earthier and drier and depend on structure and other factors to make their wine style. Wine making is more of an art form and the resulting wine traditionally needs time to develop in the bottle and also needs to be drunk with food.

New World wines (from the southern hemisphere and North America) such as those from Chile and the U.S. are well known for their exciting "fruit-forward" style (with a prominent fruit flavor and bouquet) and many of the top 100 wines of the world are the new classics from regions such as Marlborough (New Zealand), the Napa Valley (U.S.), Barossa (South Australia) and Stellenbosch (South Africa).

New World wines tend to emphasize fruit. They have challenged the traditional wine making methods employed by the Old World, and produce wines which typically have up-front ripe and fruity flavors and which can be drunk immediately, either on their own or with food. These countries encourage the fruitiness of their wine by picking the grapes at optimum ripeness, keeping the grapes and grape must chilled and by using state of the art technology during fermentation and bottling. Perhaps the single biggest factor in the success of the New World has been improvements in irrigation technology, something that is prohibited in many parts of the old winemaking world. This new use of science and technology horrifies the Old World winemakers using traditional methods.