wanted to wow friends so opened these at Cuistot in Palm Desert last night–super meal at this Bocuse-trained French resto–Dover sole dish was stunning.
11 BBM great–maybe a touch behind the amazing 08 BBM, but intense, concentrated lime/lemon wrapped with a coating of acidity, like a grand cru lemon drop.
The 99 Damoy once again soared beyond its price point and was regal–I have posted on this wine before–equally great this showing and thanks again to Peter Hirsch for sourcing this prize.
Sounds like a nice pair. I’ve only had the 09 PYCM BBM (that’s a lot of letters), which I loved, and need to find a few other vintages. Ditto on the Damoy - I’ve only had the 05 Beze, and loved it. I was spoiled by having been introduced to Carillon BBMs, which constitute the bulk of our BBM drinking.
Having another of these tonight. Interesting (to me), I decided to decant 3-4 hours early, through a coffee filter (unbleached, organic). Wow. The most ‘mud’ I think I’ve ever seen left behind in a filter.
Wondering if this doesn’t account for some of the more mediocre reviews of this wine on CT? If shaken or ‘pop and pour’, the wine is going to seem incredibly muted / 1 dimensional / monolithic if all that tannin and ‘mud’ is mixed back in?
Somewhat disappointing showing last night. 90 points or ‘sub 90 points’. Smelled better than it tasted, too pucker/acidic, blind I’d have guessed 1996! Hold the remaining bottles for a decade!
Fred. Doubtful (I think) as I pretty much do this with every wine I drink, so necessary with these big sediment wines (or say Barolo where the sediment is both very fine and also bitter). No problems with other bottles, why here?
Coffee filters have been discussed here before (like almost everything ‘Wine’).
Here’s from an earlier thread
"No less an authority than Emile Peynaud, the renown Bordeaux oenologist, states in his “Knowing and Making Wine” - “It may be stated that that the mechanical action of filtering has never had a negative influence on quality. To suggest the contrary would mean conceding that the foreign substances in suspension and their impurities that form the lees, which filtration is precisely designed to remove, have a favorable taste function.”
Typically, coffee filters are made up of filaments approximately 20 micrometres wide.
coffee filters do not at all seem to approach the pore size necessary to get the attention of one’s taste buds, other than to affect mouth feel by removing the grit some may feel “comforted by.”
Peynaud thought that red wine was a solution, not a colloid, so his understanding of filtration’s impact on wine was limited. Obviously coffee filters are not fine enough to disrupt colloidal structures, but Peynaud is not the ‘authority’ one wants to be citing in discussions of filtering wine.