Are modern wine making and modernization of wines same thng?

[JimHow]

Picking up on the discussion in the DDC thread.
Are there properties (Pontet Canet?) that merely take advantage of the best wine making techniques that science and technology have to offer but still produce traditional (but just more uniformly "better") wines, and are there properties (some of the right bank garages?) that seek to take advantage of modern science and technology to alter, manipulate, etc.?
What is "modern wine making"? What is "modernization," "internationalization," etc.?
When is a wine becoming "modernized" by the wine maker merely doing his best to produce the ripest grapes?
When is the winemaker doing something more deliberate and focused?
I don't think I phrased the question very articulately, but perhaps you know what I'm trying to get at.
When is "modernization" merely a case of employing modern winemaking techniques and when, perhaps, is it something more (something more insidious, some traditionalists might say)?

[stefan]

Pontet Canet is doing a fantastic job IMO. Their wines are quintessentially Pauillac, but better now than what they produced 20+ years ago.

I personally have no objection to manipulation. Having said that, my experience with highly extracted or heavily oaked wines is mostly negative. They tend to be all up front, not age well, and lose the sense of place.

[Blanquito]

I think a lot of it has to do with if the goal is to "change" vs "improve". I know they all say it is to improve, but really what they are doing is changing the wine in many cases (e.g. to make it drink younger). Improving doesn't necessarily change the style, like when comparing a chateau's vintages from, say, across the 1980's. Even though we can usually pick easily which vintages we think are better, the chateau's signature style is typically retained across vintages as well.

So what makes one vintage better than another in this scenario? If a chateau's goal is to maximize those things only without trying to cheat Mother Nature, I bet they can improve while retaining their style, terroir, individuality, authenticity. I think the 1st Growths have done this very well, no one calls any 1st Growth spoofed yet they keep raising the bar. Clearly declassifying lesser vats into a 2nd wine is one way to do this without changing the style. Montrose is another chateau that has improved and even changed some without losing its history.

But under the guise of improvements, many chateau have changed the style. Green harvesting, new oak, heavy barrel toast, later and later harvests, different blends, new clones which ripen with higher brix, high alcohol yeasts, tannin "management", secret additions (mega-purple, acid adjustments, fragrance), etc. The signature of the vintage, varietals, vineyard is changed. As Parker used to regularly warn (though he hasn't gone there in a long time), wine isn't made in this scenario, it is manufactured.

I think one of the biggesr changes in Bordeaux in the last 15 years is how tannins are managed. Before, Bordeaux was almost always tannic even in ripe vintages. Tannic in all but the lightest years. This was accepted, but eventually wine makers decided that changing the tannin profile was an improvement.

[JimHow]

Yes, change v. improve. It can be a fine line.

[Comte Flaneur]

Agree with all of the above

[AKR]

It's interesting how the different kinds of tannins seem to age.

To wit:

Soutard was old school for a long time, and vinified with stems. The wines were firm, and lasted far longer than the prototypical right bank.

And in ripe years, at maturity, they were excellent.

Yet - that's a small percentage of the bottles opened.

Most people cannot wait two decades.

And most do not have the patience to only buy the 3 years a decade that get enough Mother's nature's goodness to ensure quality.

So people grimace when they drink the wines, and scratch it off their list. (I myself purged all but the ripest years from my stocks)

But progress marches on, one funeral at a time, and when the estate is sold, new management brings in consultants and those with viticulture degrees.

And their wines are styled to have a broader drinking window.

Cognizant of the commercial reality that those who can cellar wines for 10-20 years prior to consumption are a very small sliver of consumers.