So I’m at a restaurant in Miami sipping on a $50 6oz pour of 2014 Domaine Leflaive Bourgogne Blanc. Very ripe. Drinking fine now but lacking acidity and Leflaive matchstick. This will probably not age well and will probably premox.
Then I realized that maybe there really isn’t any motivation for producers to “solve” the premox problem.
If they can sell it to restaurants who can mark it up 4-5x who sell a huge volume nightly why would they want to go back to a product that takes 10-20 years to come around?
If producers wanted to, they could just emulate what Coche and PYCM does or in the case of Leflaive, just go back to what they were doing.
So maybe the premox “problem” isn’t really a problem at all for 80% of the market. Just us wine geeks who want to age our wines for decades to develops nuances.
At the end of the day, money talks and maybe premox isn’t really that big of a “problem” for producers.
I think you have some keen observations there. I wonder what the percentage is of people who buy white Burgundy to cellar vs. those who buy it to drink soon. Even if wineries have a large number of happy customers who enjoy the wines young, I’m sure the producers themselves aren’t happy they can no longer age their whites as long as they used to.
Was a single glass of the 2014 Leflaive Bourgogne really $50? Is a full bottle $200?
4-5x markup isn’t unusual for some markets unfortunately. Those restaurants then get you by not allowing corkage. I know of several very good restaurants in LA and Miami that do not permit corkage.
Maybe the people who long denied the problem and those who now claim it is solved are talking about their ability to sell the wines rather than what happens after that. Seriously, it makes sense that if winemaking has anything to do with it (I’m not completely convinced that it does, but it seems highly probable), and the same changes in winemaking have made for higher scores and wines that drink better upon release, that the producers have direct incentive to not change anything or try to solve this “problem”, which really isn’t a problem for them when it comes to business. Great post, Fred.
Yeah, as long as they’re selling through each year (and don’t pay any attention if there are reports of premature oxidation in their wines), what problem? With a few exceptions, that strategy has certainly worked for the decade and a half since the malady became evident.
Ed, by-the-glass pours are notoriously poor values for the customer; restaurants commonly charge the wholesale bottle price for a single glass, although in this case it seems they’re charging closer to the retail bottle price per glass. Also, Leflaive’s Bourgogne is no longer the qpr champ it once was.
Also, even amongst us, those still buying white burgs are drinking them sooner than we were. So maybe premox is actually helping producers in terms of sales? If you have a bunch of 10-20 year old white burgs in good condition in your cellar, then you may be buying only in top vintages. If you drank all your white burg for fear of premox, then you may be more inclined to buy during average to good vintages.
Of course I don’t have any numbers to back this up. Just pure speculation.
What do you think the percentages of people who hold these to age them for decades are these days? My guess is that as the OP suggests, it probably is not that high . . .
I’ve often wondered that. Even a storied producer like Dujac. The fruit profile seems to have changed from black fruit to red/purple fruit. I don’t know if aging current wines (05 to present) will result in something as magnificent as Dujac of old.
Regarding PYCM, I have had one 02 Charmes which was magnificent with no signs of premox and some 04 Chev, Batard, and Monty that were all youthful. Hope I didn’t just jinx my last 2 bottles of 04.
I would guess very low, though the percentage would probably be higher for the most expensive producers and vineyards.
I’ve been saying the same thing as the OP - I don’t know that Burgundy is feeling much pressure to diagnose and solve the problem. Sales and prices seem to be going strong. If they are feeling any pressure, it might be at the very expensive level (e.g. Domaine Leflaive), where more buyers age the wines and are knowledgeable enough to know and to care about premox.
And then you consider how difficult it would be to diagnose, since (1) most producers are small so neither incentivized nor having the resources to do a lot of investigation and experimentation, and (2) you can’t tell whether something you tried worked or not unless you (a) have a good baseline for premox rates in the past and (b) wait 7-10 years to see how the change worked out or didn’t.
Lastly, Burgundy is being made in a riper and lower acid style in recent years, which is drinkable early and probably more popular with consumers, and I suspect that is the reason, or a big part of the reason, the wines aren’t as well protected against oxidation. If that’s true, they may very well not even want to solve premox, since it might mean making wines that aren’t as popular with consumers (most of whom aren’t going to age the wines for long enough for them to get premoxed).
And there is an obvious solution - use screwcaps. Even if closures were not the reason for premox (I doubt they are, myself), a screwcap could still be the solution. But of course the romance and the tradition and it’s not proven blah blah blah.
I still hear a lot of BS from importers and producers on this issue, although not nearly as much as I did a few years ago. Whether it’s someone saying they don’t have premox anymore after increasing SO2 additions and switching to DIAM (even though enough time hasn’t passed to really know that), or that a certain producer hasn’t had ANY incidence of premox (when that is blatantly not true, even if they aren’t one of the really bad offenders), it all seems like the same old denial with a different face. Of course, it would make sense if they just want something to appease people like me while they continue to not care very much. I do get the sense that some of these people really want to believe what they’re saying, and may have actually convinced themselves because of that. Motivation surrounding this is a complicated issue.
Most producers I’ve spoken with are aware, concerned and would like to do something about the issue. But few are certain about what to do, and for good reason. It just seems very unlikely that any single producer could possibly do careful enough testing to know for certain the causes and remedies of premox. They can guess and approximate, which is what they do. But is it sulfur additions, number of punch-downs, acidity, global warming, riper picking, etc. etc.?
I think it would take a well-funded independent body (perhaps the French government) to do the long-term controlled testing to determine the best practices to minimize premox while making the kind of wine producers want to make. Is this happening? I’d bet that the French government has higher priorities for their wine/agriculture bureaucracy budget.