Many thanks Don for sharing this and in particular summarising you’re conclusions. Invaluable information, and clearly completely objective and impartial.
I drank batard 2005 and perrieres 2005 12m ago. 2 bottles reputedly plagued by premox. Both were great, directly from domaine.
I dont question your tasting capabilities. I dont like how you draw conclusions based on a few samples that are definitely not statistically representative. In statistics you could rather call these datapoints outliers. You want to call them “the average”.
“Outliers” are when among a statistically significant sample a much smaller number register as a deviation, as in the tails of a bell curve. Whatever we have, that is not what we have here. The fact that among a very small number of bottles premox has consistently appeared has to be disturbing. To be sure, it is not determinative statistically either, but it seems, at the least, very odd, no?
Pierre Morey has made a huge contribution to winemaking, and it is sad, as you say, that things have come to this pass. But the entire pre-mox phenomenon is sadder still, and what is to be done when winemakers won’t take responsibility for it?
Btw, Don, curious why PYCM does not make it on to your list of those in the Morey family you buy?
Hi Herwig
I miss seeing you. Hope we meet up again soon.
I wasn’t intending to digress about this, but my experience with Pierre Morey, while definitely limited since 2002, has been sadly consistent. Because of my bad prior experiences, I do not include any Pierre Morey wines on the “eligible list” of wines for the vintage assessment dinners (just as I don’t include Pierre Amiot, Blain-Gagnard, Fontaine-Gagnard, Matrot, Mikulksi, Le Moine and, until 2011, Jadot). But periodically one of the attendees lobbies me to allow them to bring a Pierre Morey MP or Batard because they don’t own any other bottles from the eligible list. I particularly remember the 2004 Pierre Morey MP. On the 2004 vintage it was damn hard to produce premoxed wine. There was so much sulfur trapped between the grapes from the oidium treatments that almost everybody produced reductive wines – even Henri Boillot. One of the attendees wanted to bring 2004 Pierre Morey MP to the dinner despite the fact that it wasn’t on the eligible list. I insisted the only way we could do that would be to open a bottle together in advance to check it. We did, and sure enough it was oxidized. For the 2007 night one dinner, one of the attendees wanted to bring a 2007 Pierre Morey MP, which again wasn’t on the eligible list. I said no. He ended up bringing the bottle to the dinner anyway and offered it as a “backup” or additional wine. We didn’t drink it (we had 30 wines that night) and, at the end of the evening, he gave me the bottle to take home and try. About four months later I opened it side by side with a PYCM MP. The PYCM was off the charts great, but the Pierre Morey version was highly advanced and got poured down the drain.
The 2011 Pierre Morey Batard wasn’t on the eligible list in 2019 either. It got included in the dinner only because we had one slot left to fill in the Batard flight, and that was the only 2011 Batard the attendee owned. I didn’t own any more 2011 Batards myself and I already had one ringer in the Batard flight, so I reluctantly agreed to include the Pierre Morey Batard. We ended up with three advanced or oxidized bottles in that flight – Boillot Batard, Pernot Batard, and Pierre Morey Batard. I wasn’t the least bit surprised by any of them. So, until I see some published evidence about significant changes in Pierre Morey’s winemaking, there won’t be any more of his wines included in these dinners.
I do buy Colin-Morey wines for sure, but since he is Marc Colin’s son, I always consider him part of the Colin family. 
His real name is Pierre-Yves Colin, but now people refer to him as PYCM.
Gotcha, Don,
Forgot.
+1
What producers are on your eligible list?
Seems that Pierre-Yves Collin Morey is on the eligible list judging by the huge number of his wines present at the diner. I would call this statistically representative of PYCM production at least !
Congrats also for having cracked the mysteries of premox: DIAM closure is the solution… until it is proven the contrary.
Super bold statements as always.
These tastings provide valuable information, and DC simply summarizes his experience with various producers going back through many years of these assessment dinners as well as from his personal tastings. Apparently your experience has been different. However, you are the one who is drawing bizarre conclusions. You are really annoying.
Dude: I am the only one saying that my personal experience does not prove the wines of a particular producer can be considered as highly risky across the board from what you guys call “a premox perspective” (note that I also diasgree with your words).
A tasting is a tasting: wines were flawed. So be it. Let’s not judge too rapidly a domaine, a man, a family and decades of hard work simply because a bunch of guys popped the wines and find them shitty. Otherwise the door is opened for anything (including personal agenda and urban legends)
There has been an issue for years. Just because you don’t like it does not invalidate the year over year results.
I dont invalidate the results of a tasting my dear. Please allow me to find presumptuous the high level conclusions drawn from the tasting.
20+% failure rate on 61 bottles is significant. One can’t say this is just bad luck or user error. Gather up all of Don’s data going back a decade+ and the steady problematic error rates become far more than credible. I’m sure there’s a statistician on this board who could give us error bars around these samples, but no reasonable person could say there’s no problem. Result: I don’t buy GC White Burg (yea, it’s stupidly expensive, too) and don’t try to store any for decades. Happily I enjoy (lesser) white burgs young. I really appreciate Don’s effort.
The ad hominem attacks are, as usual, standard fare for online discussions. I just try to ignore them.
Condescend much?
No one is impugning Pierre Morey or any other producer. However, I have a limited amount of money to spend on wine, especially given the price of white burgundy. In my experience, and in the experience of others, Pierre Morey wines suffer from premox. If your experience differs, that’s great for you, and you should keep buying and enjoying these wines. But I find your argument quixotic; you would like us all to invalidate significant personal experiences (some of them on a blind basis) because YOUR personal experiences have been different. That’s not how this works.
Sorry to develop quixotic thesis. Apparently affirming that 2011 vintage has a 20pct premox rate on the basis of 60 wines tasted only one time does not call questions.
Well noted. Thanks
Not that I agree with Emmanuel, but before we totally blow him out of the water with nuclear weapons, realize that a tasting of these wines in LA may yield totally different results than a tasting of the same wines in France. the wines that made it to LA have very likely been exposed to more oxidative stress than those in france, particularly those that have come straight from a domain’s cellars. I don’t know where Emmanuel lives, but this could be a factor in his experience. Of course this still doesn’t mean that certain wines are still far more susceptible to premox than other wines.
One illustration of this is in the 2018 Dauvissat thread currently on this board. I gave up on WB many years ago, but still have accumulated Dauvissat wines. My hand begins to shake when I choose a bottle from the 2008-2011 range because of a very high premox rate. And yet in that thread William Kelly, whose opinion I trust, has stated that he has never had a premoxed bottle of Dauvissat of any age in France. so for those in France, talk of a high premox rate amongst Dauvissat, and perhaps many other producers, may sound like crazy-talk.
I’m living in Paris. My wines are cellared in a very cool and damp cellar in the outskirts of paris. All wines are shipped from the domaines where I have allocations to the cellar. Pierre Morey is releasing every year old vintages from his cellar, kept in pristine conditions. Never had an issue since I hzve started buying in 2010.
It does not mean there are absolutely no issues with the wines but even vintages called problematic like 2002 have proven immune (perrieres 2002 was superb).
I will do another tasting of batard in a few months (most likely 2007,2005), if there are some issues I will happy to report them to you folks.
Cheers
In my experience some wines are extremely fragile and some are not.
Sauternes is almost indestructible.
And for example a lot of Leroy bottles post 1999 (to talk about one glorious estate) are leaking and wines are extremely fragile. I had hard times to transport them in good conditions. I remember having bought a pack of genaivrieres 2009 which started to leak a few hours after I transported them.
So yes, the place where you taste wines matters and I agree it is a pitty from a “customer experience” perspective if you find high variations between wines drunk in LA and those drunk in Meursault