'07 Tablas Creek Esprit, Rouge, brett or Mourvedre?

Since this wine was declared ready to drink a few years ago I’ve plowed through a case of 375ml and seven 750ml, all purchased from the winery near release. All but the most recent bottles were excellent and good ringers for traditional C9dP. The last three bottles, however, smelled a bit like Kriek, a slightly prickly palate, and almost metallic after taste. One unpleasantly so and the other two more acceptable. This seems to me to be classic notes of brett with maybe some VA in the mix as well. I’m not concerned with a little brett in these styles of wines, but now I fear they may have passed my threshold. This aside, they are otherwise aging well.
Any experiences?
I have two more 750ml purchased more recently from the winery. Will be interesting to see how they perform.

Peter,

Interesting indeed. Have you reached out to Jason or the winery in general? They’re usually on top of these things. What you describe certainly sounds like it could be a combo of brett and VA. There certainly is the potential for both of these ‘increasing’ as a wine ages until they are above your threshold for picking these things out - but I don’t believe TC has any kind of history of these things happening. I’d be curious to hear if others have had similar experiences - and see what the winery has to say. I’m assuming these were stored ‘well’, correct?

Cheers.

Larry,
Definitely stored properly. I’ve not contacted Jason, there is no obvious way of doing that as far as I can tell. But I’m not really interested in replacements, just in checking if others have similar impressions of the wine.

I had one in April '18 that was excellent. Have three more in the cellar. Guess I better pop one to see if they are going down hill.

Thanks to a nice email from a board member I need to make a slight clarification. When I mentioned Kriek I did not means to imply the wine was fizzy, this apparently is an issue that the winery is aware of and has corrected in later vintages. It was just the most obvious aromatic association that came to mind.
Don, these three bottles were opened last week, prior to that it might have been a year since I opened earlier bottles. Hope yours perform better than mine.

I bought two bottles of this on release. Drank one in 2013 and one in 2017 and both were similarly flawed per your description (though I have never tried Kriek). More than a few other notes on CT like this as well. 4000 cases were produced - there must have been a bad batch somewhere in the mix.

I would love some wine that tasted like Kriek. yummmmm