Champagne Selosse makes 3000 bottles of its cuvee Substance per year. This Champagne is made according to the technique of solera which means that there is every year an addition of a new vintage in the barrels, to replace what is bottled from this barrel. Substance began in 1986.
I have drunk in a very short distance in time two Substance disgorged on July 29, 2013. One came from my cellar and corresponds to a buy that I made directly in the property of Anselme Selosse and the trunk of my car was loaded by Anselme himself.
The other came from a restaurant which I know for more that 50 years, which has allocations from very prestigious domaines. This restaurant exists for more than one century and never buys through merchants. It is always coming directly from the domains.
As at a period of disgorgement the quantity can be counted only in hundreds and not in thousands, how is it possible that the date is printed with two different manners? I cannot imagine that for the same wine disgorged the same day, the Domaine has used two different printers.
So, I relate that to the work of the experts who say : this is a fake because they see tiny differences between two labels. Here, in this case, the difference is huge. I am confident in the two bottles and it leads me to one general remark: the labels are not printed with a 100% safe logic. Many times the domaines have labeled differently the same wines, because they did not labeled at the same moment and changed the procedure.
This does not minimize the work of the experts, but small differences do not mean automatically that one bottle is a fake.
I remember having bought three Musigny Coron Père & Fils 1899. The three bottles of the same lot had different bottles in size. The labels were the same but not the bottles.
My experience is not to draw conclusions too quickly when I see differences. What do you think of these two different printings, thing which normally should not arrive?
(I am sorry that the 2 pictures have not the same size but the labels have the same size)
John,
It is certainly what happened, but generally when you produce such a small number of bottles, you would print as many labels as you have produced.
And the printing of the date is so different!
recently , I was asked to help in an argument related to a magnum of Henri Jayer’s 1978 Echezeaux . The wine was presented to an auction house in Belgium . The capsule on the bottle was not the usual red but a deep almost purple red .
The picture of the wine was shown on the auction house website .
A competitor auction house saw this and alerted my friend Don C and also Maureen D , both real experts and active on the board . They looked at the picture and rightfully said the color of the capsule is wrong , thus this could be a fake . ( knowing how many fake Jayer’s there are , not a surprising conclusion ) .
The owner of the auction house was embarrassed and asked for my help . I happen to know the owner of the magnum . I called him and he told me he bought the wine during the early eigthies , together with another friend of mine , top collector and Jayer friend . So this particular bottle was a late release , completely genuine ( unless my 2 friends are liars wich I do not believe ) .
Because of the commotion , the wine did not sell . We are now planning to buy it with 6 friends and drink it together . We’ll see .
The date and lot stamps on the label on the left looks to have been printed with a dot-matrix printer (almost certainly by a computer) while that on the right looks like a line-printer or typewriter (perhaps by hand).
The second label was affixed immediately and shipped to the restaurant. They have an excellent cellar with humidity, hence the darker color of the paper.
The first label came from a drawer in Jacques’s “office” and printed on his printer for the bottles in the cellar. It was affixed later to avoid decomposition of said label from humidity. He knew which bin held the July 29 bottles since so few were produced.
I think the darker color in example two is because the label got wet (ice bucket).
I too see the possibility of both being genuine, as others have mentioned. The bottles could have the same wine and same label, but it is the case that the labels were affixed at different points in time. Because one bottle sat in the cave unlabeled for longer, when it came time to label, the date was printed with a different method than the earlier batch.
