I received an email from SommSelect to purchase some 1979 burgundy and seems like a great chance to try aged burgundy for a somewhat reasonable price but it looks like the wine was decanted and rebottled. Would that cause the wine to oxidize faster and possibly go bad. Below is the part of the description.
For today’s ‘79, every ‘shiner’ bottle was decanted off its 40 years of sediment, topped off with the very same wine, recorked, cleaned, and then labeled.
I have had a few reconditioned wines. All showed that they would benefit from more cellaring. I would ask when it was reconditioned. The process will create something akin to bottle shock, and it will possibly need time (years) to recover. If it is done properly, it can extend a wine’s drinking window. But, there is a risk that something can go wrong. The only way to tell is to pull the cork and taste. If you are a buyer and have an opportunity to try one before going long, that’s what I would suggest.
We were involved in a re-corking process for Margaret and Peter Lehmann’s cellar a few years ago. These were wines from the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s. We removed each cork with a Durand, dropped some dry ice straight into the neck of the bottle, tasted a very small amount to check that the wine was sound and topped with a young, unoaked Shiraz or Cabernet (depending on what the wine was) and added about 30 parts of Sulphur. The amount of topping wine was relatively small, usually less than 30ml. It certainly hasn’t caused the wines to oxidise faster, in fact I suspect it has indeed prolonged the life of these wines.
Biondi-Santi does this from time to time for customers with older bottles of their Brunello, though it’s been a few years I think. I believe they top up with current vintage. I like the idea of a fresh cork in bottles meant for ultra age.
always find out if the wine was topped with the same or a younger wine. If they are good, it’s done in a nitrogen environment. I tend to pass on these, wanting “the original.”
I think Bouchard does that every so often with that stash of super old Meursault they have. They simply sacrifice one of the bottles to top the remaining ones rather than topping with a new vintage.
At least that is what we were told on a tour years ago.
Not a fan of recond. bottles. They taste usually somwhat artificial, with less character, muted, younger … or off.
Foolish to decant it from sediment … what for?
True, but I was thinking about the dry ice contacting the wine also. Jeremy is super knowledgeable, and I wouldn’t discount anything he says. It was just interesting to hear his process and ponder the outcome.