Old World Wine vs. New World Wine | The Ultimate Guide + Tasting

A lot of people are curious about Old World versus New World wine. What's the difference? Which one is better? What should I buy? By the end of this video, you won't have to wonder anymore. And if you stick around to the very end, I'll give you the key features that distinguish the two styles so that you can make sure you're finding which style is actually right for you. My name is Ashwin Mathaiya. I'm an author, world traveler, and host of Unpin. And today, we're going to be relearning some things. Let's go. Before we dive in, it's important to realize that this debate, Old World versus New World, has been going on for many, many years, ever since the New World started making wine. And there was this time back in the 70s when California wines, blind tasting, won against Bordeaux. And it kind of sent the world into uproar. The question is not which one is better. Or I'm going to try my best not to answer that for you because you should draw your own conclusion on that. The question is, what makes them different? And that's what we're going to focus on over the course of this video. So first things first, what does Old World and New World even mean? Obviously, the world is the same age, four or five billion years old, if I remember my geology correctly. What we're talking about are parts of the world. So Old World refers to mainland Europe. You can think of this as any country that was at one point a colonial power. New World, we're talking about countries or regions that at one point were colonies. So Old World is France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc. New World, you've got the Americas, South Africa, Australia, all those kind of New World wine regions, these countries that were at one point colonies. Now, we should acknowledge that this is a little bit reductionist. And it's a bit unfortunate because there are plenty of old cultures that were in those colonies prior to them being colonized. There are also Old World cultures outside of Europe. And it's a bit reductionist to say Europe is Old World and these other places are New World. But that's the framework we use in wine. It's a terminology that floats around. And so that's what we'll use in this video while acknowledging and respecting the fact that it is a little bit reductionist. Another important point to set the stage here is where does the grapevine that is suitable for winemaking come from? It comes from the Old World. And the species is called Vitis vinifera. There are other species of grapevines like Vitis raparia, Vitis labrusca that come from the New World, but they're not suitable for winemaking. And so when you think about this historically, over the course of thousands or millions of years, you have Vitis vinifera in Europe that creates all different types of grapes because the evolution happens over a long period of time. And this is why you have a very diverse base of varietals that are available in the Old World, as opposed to in the New World, the wines, the grapes had to be brought from Europe to the Americas and then they're planted. And so you didn't have this natural evolution of a bunch of different varietals. And what ends up happening as a result is that in the New World, you end up tasting and you start with planting and then you end up tasting mostly the French varietals, the noble varietals, which is why we as a culture are generally used to drinking kind of the same 20 grapes. About 99% of our wine drinking is from 20 different varietals in the US, whereas there are over 10,000 known wine grape varietals on the planet. But the point that's important to illustrate here is that we're very familiar with the French varietals because of this phenomenon. And so when we taste through Old World and New World, we're going to compare these French varietals in their source, so from France, versus those same French varietals in the New World. For instance, this vineyard here in the New World is planting Chardonnay and Merlot, the usual suspects of French varietals that we're all used to. So what this means for us as we're comparing Old World versus New World is that we need to focus on the varietals that are widely available in both regions. And so it wouldn't really make sense for us to try tasting the Cazzatelli from Georgia or Ribollagella from Slovenia because there's not a whole lot of that planted here in the New World. Instead, we're going to taste the French varietals, the noble varietals that are widely planted both in the Old World and the New World. And if we're going to be tasting Old World varietals for the Old World portion, we might as well go straight to the source. So we're going to do something that I don't normally do. You've probably very rarely seen me do, if ever. We're going to open a bunch of wines from those 20 grapes that everyone tends to drink. And the reason we're going to do that is because we're trying to deduce something about style. The goal of this video is for you to understand the difference in style between Old World and New World. And we're going to use these varietals, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, as a canvas to understand the difference in style so that you can then go exploring the world of wine. Knowing that difference in style will apply even if you're talking about the weirder varietals like Fogliatonda. But you will know generally what to expect with these family of wines in the Old World and this other family of wines in the New World. That sounds good. I think it's time to open some wine. At this point, I think it's important to note I do not dislike France or their wines or the varietals that grow there. I dislike how overrepresented their wines are and their varietals are as compared to the diverse array of wines that are available in the rest of the world. And so I'm perfectly happy with French wines. I just want to encourage you and everyone to drink a lot more of the other wines too because they are awesome and they often don't see the light of day. So a quick word here, we're going to be doing a full wine tasting. I'll include a list to the wines you can purchase or similar wines you can purchase so that you can follow along if you think it could be useful. Feel free to pause, taste the wines and draw some conclusions independently of what I'm sharing because I'm not a final authority on wine. No one is. All right, now we're actually going to go open wine. Let's do this thing. All right, for our Old World Sauvignon Blanc, we've got a wine from France. This is a Sancerre, so in the Loire Valley. And it's Sauvignon Blanc. We're going to taste it compared to a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough. So this is our Old World Sauvignon Blanc. This is a Sancerre. So in the Old World, we talk about wines usually by their place and that's why mostly you'll hear this called Sancerre. That is a place in the Loire Valley in France. The varietal that's being used is Sauvignon Blanc. And we're going to give this a swirl and a smell. So we're going to smell and taste Old World wines before the New World wines in each of these three side-by-sides. And I'll tell you why actually at the very end so that I don't spoil any conclusions. So I smell here. Like first thing I notice is, and if you drink a lot of wine, you'll start to pick this up. You can tell how full-bodied or not the wine is based on how it moves in the glass. This is pretty light-bodied. It moves very easily when I swirl it like this. A fuller-bodied wine actually takes a little bit more effort in your wrist to swirl it. So if you're at that level, great. If you're not, maybe drink a little more wine. Responsibly, of course, responsibly, responsibly. Always responsibly. Cool. Let's smell this. So I don't smell a ton of fruit here. I smell maybe some green apples, maybe a little bit of like peaches, but very, very light. Underripe, like not very... I wouldn't characterize this by any means as a fruity wine. In fact, I smell a lot more minerals and I don't smell a whole lot of wood. There's not a lot of oak influence here that I can smell easily. So not a ton of vanilla or butterscotch. Not a lot of butter. That would be from malolactic fermentation. I don't smell a ton of it. Yeah, really minerally, more austere. When I say austere, I mean it feels more serious because it doesn't smell like Froot Loops. Not necessarily that Froot Loops is a bad thing. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and taste this. So it's morning and I don't have a spit bucket, so I might just get all drunk while I shoot this. Light body, so I can feel that right away, just like I noted in the glass. It's also quite high in acid. So my mouth is flushing with acidity. These wines aren't... I haven't quite gotten them to the right temperature, so I'm feeling the acid more than I would otherwise. If you chill your wines, you'll feel the acidity a little bit less. It's actually why white wines are usually served cold. So really, really high acid, actually. White-bodied. There are no tannins here because there's no skin contact. Not much different in terms of the tasting notes compared to what I was smelling. If anything, I'm getting a little bit more citrus now. Lemon pit, a little bit of grapefruit. When I stick my nose back in here, I can pick those things up. It's actually one of the cool things about wine tasting is that you'll smell things, your brain forms a picture of what the wine is, and then you taste it, and then your mouth tells your brain, hey, that's not quite right. Try again. And then you'll start to notice new notes in the wine that you might not have before. To recap, here we've got high acidity, it's light-bodied, not very fruity, and much more mineral-driven. That's our recap of our French Old World Sauvignon Blanc. Let's go to the New World. Sauvignon Blanc again. This is from Marlborough in New Zealand. I'm gonna swirl it, smell it. Super fruity. Out of the gate. Super duper fruity. In fact, when we were pouring it, we actually opened this earlier for the inserts. Very fruity. You could smell it as soon as you were pouring it. Very, very loud, meaning there's a lot of aroma here. It's expressive. You can just smell a lot of stuff. I'm smelling, whenever I open Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, I smell like tropical fruit smoothie. I smell guava. I smell passion fruit. I smell plenty of grapefruit. I smell kiwis. I don't know if I smell kiwis because of the association of New Zealand and kiwis, or if it's actually there, but hey, what can you do? Yeah, super fruity. I still get some of that lemon pith. I'm not getting a ton of minerality. So minerality is a concept in wine. You'll hear a lot. You might be familiar with it. If you're not, it's basically, it's a little hard to define. It's one of those, you know it when you see it kind of things. And so we'll usually describe it as like gravel or wet slate or river rocks or limestone. Things that are not normally associated with foods, like they're not things that you would eat, but you'll find those smells in wine. I don't smell a lot of it here, if I'm being honest. Tons of fruit. And then green pepper. There's a concept in wine called varietal fingerprint. I don't talk about it that often because they're mostly only known for the noble French varietals because there have been so many made in so many different places around the world. However, there are plenty of other wine grapes that are really cool and interesting, but only a small number of growers grow them. And so then it becomes difficult to identify varietal fingerprint because you don't have enough of a mass of winemakers making that same grape that you can observe one characteristic that is always there, regardless of what you do to the wine. Sauvignon Blanc, as you can imagine, there are millions of producers of it. And so there is a varietal fingerprint. It's green pepper or grass. It's that kind of capsaiciny smell. I smell that more actually in the new world than in the old world. So I'm going to go and give it a taste. This is also light bodied. You can kind of see it moves very similarly. I'm going to see if I can swirl with both hands at the same time. Sort of, not really. That's not bad, right? Let's make sure I got the right wine in the right hand. Yep, still super fruity. So I'm going to taste. So still really high acid here. Really quite high in acid. Also light bodied and getting a ton of fruit. Like that, even on the palate, it's just a ton, a ton of fruit. Quite dry. Both wines don't have a ton of sugar in them. Might be detecting a hint of sugar here. I can't, I can't really tell if that's just the fruitiness that's tricking my brain or if there is actually sugar. Still light bodied. Again, no tannins because there's no skin contact. Cool. So recapping wine number two, the New World wine. We've got a lot of fruit, much more playful and pleasurable in the sense that fruits are things that most of us find really pleasing. Minerals are things that often we may not really find immediately like attractive in a glass of wine. And that's where we're going to pause with our comparison for our Sauvignon Blanc. Now let's move to our Chardonnay. This video is sponsored by The Unpinned Wine Course. Welcome to The Unpinned Wine Course, your guide to wine from your couch to the world's vineyards. With over four hours of fun and easy to follow video content, a community of wine lovers and downloadable wine guides with almost every chapter, we help you transform your ordinary everyday wine experiences into something extraordinary. I can't wait to see you there. All right, now we're going to taste our Chardonnays. We've got a Chablis. So this is always still from France. Chablis is the place. It's in Burgundy and we're going to taste our Chardonnay from the New World in South Africa. So we'll start with the Old World here. I'm gonna give it a swirl of a smell. Very pleasing. Pleasing but not in an obvious way. So I'm smelling, again, some orchard fruits. So apples, pears, but less... It's not like green apple and really sour pear. It's like more ripe apple, like a red delicious apple that I'm ready to bite into. I'm still smelling... Like I'm getting almost like light honey notes. I'm getting some floral notes too. So maybe even honeysuckle or white flowers. I'm smelling a little bit of wood influence here. Not a ton, but like there's some vanilla, a little bit of tonka bean. Tonka bean's in my mind because I just had a cake baked with it. I'm gonna go ahead and give this a taste. Medium acidity here. Medium plus. So still feeling the acid, but nothing quite like the Sauvignon Blanc that was like just blistering. It's a lighter body than I thought it was. So I don't know how I got... I'm like kind of getting tricked when I swirl. It feels a little more viscous, but on the palate, very light bodied. I'm getting enough of that minerality again. Not tons like in the Sancerre. Little notes of maybe like gravel or limestone kind of thing. It's way more subdued on the minerality than the Sancerre was, but it's still present. Yeah, if I were to recap this wine right here, a little more fun than our Sancerre. I'm getting some of the fruit that makes it kind of fun, but still austere when you get to this kind of floral and a little bit of these like wood notes that are quite hard to detect. It's not over the top. That's how I'll characterize our Old World Chardonnay here. Moving to the New World. We're in Stellenbosch, South Africa for a Chardonnay. This one definitely feels more viscous when you try and swirl it. A little bit more molasses-like. Give it a smell. Yeah, wow. Okay, so this smells like New World in a glass, and I'm gonna try and break down why it smells that way. So I'm smelling tons of wood influence, like tons and tons of it. Vanilla and butterscotch and kind of this... When I smell a lot of wood influence, I'm talking about oak, I smell like wet recycled paper towel. It's like really, really strong. It's very pungent in its aromas again. So if I were to just stick my nose in here versus in here, there's just a lot more aroma coming out of this glass. The same thing actually happened when I opened this bottle. I could just smell it with just the bottle opening, which is absolutely not true with our Old World wine. Let me give this a taste. So like ripe, ripe fruits, even overripe. Apples, cinnamon. I mean, it's got like an apple pie-like taste to it. It's really full-bodied. That was kind of what I was motioning. The wine, as it moves around my palate, it's actually really hard to move it. Full-bodied, so high in alcohol. Very, very flavor-packed, concentrated flavors. A lot of it driven from the wood. So if I were to characterize this guy, again, quite loud. A lot of influence from the barrel. A lot of influence from the wine making. Maybe a little bit less from the grape itself. And I think I'll leave it right there for our Chardonnays. All right, now we're down to our final two wines. We're tasting two reds, Pinot Noirs. One from Burgundy, which is probably the most famous place where Pinot Noir is made. And we've got a Pinot Noir from California. So we'll start with the Old World again. Do a swirl. I'm smelling figs, like dried figs. I'm smelling like kind of dried fruits, raisiny fruits. Not, you know, the kind of fruits that are really appealing that you want to eat right away. But the ones that might be in a fruitcake or something, you know, a little bit more not sexy, if you will, when it comes to fruits. If you can describe fruits as sexy or not sexy. I'm smelling, I'm smelling a lot of like, almost like mushroomy or herbs or kind of like dried leaves in the fall. Just like foliage type of stuff. There's the unmistakable smell of hay, like straw. Like I'm taken back to like when I was a kid and we used to go do like hay rides and stuff. I'm from Georgia. That was a thing we did. Yeah, dried fruits and then like foresty stuff is what I'm smelling. It gives a taste. I didn't spit that one because it actually tastes really good. We might need to cut that because I'm not supposed to have opinions. Quite a lot of acid actually. Pretty bright, but it's balanced by the tannins. So tannins make your mouth go dry. They're bitter. Acid makes your mouth water. And so when you have both happening at the same time, it can create a really nice equilibrium in your mouth. That's kind of what's happening here. Still pretty light bodied. Light, maybe medium bodied. The spectrum for light, medium, full bodied and reds is a little bit different than whites because red wines will usually just, if you take all reds versus all whites, you'll usually have a little bit more alcohol in reds than whites. Reason being, you can actually balance that with the third dimension tannins that you cannot balance it with in whites. So 15% white wine will usually, almost always, not always, but almost always feel out of balance. That's not the case for reds. So we've got kind of dried fruits, this kind of like barnyardy, hay, farm, you know, like being on a farm, foliage, that kind of vibe going on here. I would still consider it kind of austere for that reason. It's not like strawberries and chocolate, really obviously kind of traditionally pleasurable aromas and tastes. So that's our recap for our old world Pinot Noir. Let's go to the new world. All right, give it a smell, give it a smell. Yeah, there's that wet recycled paper towel again. So heavy, heavy influence of wood, maybe even like oak chips. So artificial influence of wood, I don't know, but just so, so strong and heavy, like really like cinnamony, almost like cinnamon extract, vanilla extract, like just really, really pungent. Yeah, I honestly can't get over that. It smells like I'm like sticking my head inside a barrel. I'm supposed to be neutral, right? That's not very neutral. Yeah, the fruits are ripe. They're like really ripe and luscious, like almost like, I don't know, like strawberries that are stewed that are going to go into a pie. It's a little bit one-dimensional here. Give it a taste. So not very acidic here. Pretty low, medium acidity. It's full-bodied, like you can kind of feel the alcohol. You can even call it hot a little bit. Yeah, pretty full-bodied, especially for Pinot Noir that you'd expect to be, you know, a little bit light to medium. It's up there, very pungent and punchy in its aromas. Lots of influence from the winemaking, lots of wood, lots of what I, what I appear, what appears to me is like manipulations in the wine. We'll try to keep neutrality until we make our final conclusions about these wines. But here we've got something a little more austere, a little more elegant. Some fruit, but not too much, mostly dried fruit. You've got some acidity and you've got some like kind of funkier stuff, like mushrooms and forest flora. And then here we've got our New World wine, more fruity or more barrel, a little bit less of the funky stuff. So Old World, New World, what can we conclude about the differences stylistically in our Old World versus our New World? So let's kind of walk through the recaps a little bit. We've got in the Old World wines that are a little bit more austere, a little bit less fruit forward, a little more difficult to approach, way less bouquet. They're less loud, they're more quiet, meaning you just can't smell or taste as much stuff. In the New World, we've got wines that are louder. There's way more bouquet. There's just way more stuff that you can smell and taste. A lot of fruit, a fair amount of oak influence. Like some of them, in my opinion, like too much, just a little bit hard to drink because they're out of balance. What does that tell us about the styles generally? In the Old World, you have wines that are made to express the time and place because wine has been made there for a very, very long time. In the New World, you have wines that are made generally to appeal to consumer trends because there isn't a long history of winemaking in the New World. Now I wanna be careful here because I'm not saying all New World producers are not making wine expressive of terroir. But as a general rule, broadly speaking, in the New World, you're gonna find wines that have more influence of the winemaking. So more manipulations, more extraction. So trying to get as much flavor as you possibly can out of the grapes. More wood influence, smaller barrels, newer barrels, toasted barrels. And you could kind of perceive that in these two wines right here, where you kind of started smelling that wet recycled paper towel that I really just, I personally do not really like because it overwhelms all the other flavors. When you have really extracted strong flavored wines, you will start to overrun a lot of the nuance that might be there underneath because these stronger flavors are obviously more powerful. And so we can talk about where does this come from? I alluded to it just a few minutes ago. It is the fact that wine has existed in the Old World for so long. You have winemakers that are passing down tradition for generation after generation after generation. And they're very proud of making their wine their way. Even if consumer trends change and people drink less of it, if you go to an Italian winemaker and you tell them, hey, the American market would like for you to change the way you're making your Chianti Classico, they're gonna be pretty upset in general. They're not going to wanna make that change. Now, of course, the market does adapt. And this is where super Tuscans come in when we're talking about Tuscany specifically, which is a wine that was born to cater to more American tastes. But that's another video. We haven't filmed that yet, but it'll be another video. The Old World is rooted to their traditions. And so they don't really care as much if consumer tastes change. They say, no, I'm gonna make my wines my way because it's how my grandma did it, my great-grandma or my grandpa, my great-grandpa. Whereas in the New World, you have way less traditionalism. You have more capitalism, which is let's find a product that can achieve product market fit. Let's make a wine that pleases people as opposed to waiting for people's taste to arrive to the wine. And that is the general difference between Old World and New World. Now, does Old World always get it right? No, they can be kind of stuck up about it sometimes. So no, they don't get it right all the time, but it does allow for more expressive wines of the terroir because even if the flavors aren't necessarily super pleasurable, they will allow that to be expressed anyway. So that's all we got. I'm looking at my production team. All right, back to shopping.