Being obtuse on a message board is only a winning strategy if your goal is to be an asshole.
Don’s argument is clearly that the wines they’ve tasted had a 20% premox rate. You are pretending that has been extrapolated to the vintage as a whole. That’s your bizarre .
Too many of us have had premoxed wines from Pierre Morey to accept your demand that we stop taking about a premox issue because YOU haven’t. I have to make decisions about buying wines based on what I want to drink. The Pierre Morey wines I’ve had have a high premox rate. Should I keep buying them because you claim you haven’t had that problem? Not until you start paying me for the wines I pour down the drain.
Your argument is quixotic, not your thesis. You have no thesis.
That’s an interesting point, but I live in the US. If Pierre Morey wines can’t handle importation, I’d say they’re still flawed. Even if he made the best wines in the world, if I couldn’t drink then anywhere other than France, what use are they to me?
Emmanuel, do you know if yours are reconditioned late releases or original bottlings? Some domaines (eg. Fabian Coche) release reconditioned old vintages with new cork and label and the old wines are topped off. In those instances the 1985 taste as fresh as if it were bottled last year because…they were.
I believe premox is like cancer. Not just in the figurative sense but in that it is probably a multi hit model. There is the genetics (the wine or winemaking) that determines a certain level of susceptibility. Then there is environmental/oxidative stress like shipping and storage. Corks and added sulfur may be considered modifiable risk factors to some extent or “antioxidants”. Just my personal hypothesis.
I’ve also found that older Champagne from London or Europe usually tastes fresher than older champagne I purchase in the US.
Don, thanks for your notes. Beyond the reasons already stated, I find them valuable because it’s helpful, as a novice, to see that even experienced folks like yourself run into bottle flaws that aren’t easily categorized. When I open something that doesn’t taste right and the flaw doesn’t fit the profiles of premox, VA, TCA, brett or whatnot, I have felt like a dope for not being able to nail it better. “Chemically off” is a good descriptor.
My limited experience with Pierre Morey wines , tastings from the last couple of years ( tasting notes on vinotopia.be , my wine buddies club )
2005 Batard : oxydised
Perrieres 05 : 93/100 and 94/100
Charmes 07 : 93/100
Batard 04 : corked and second bottle oxidised
Perrieres 04 : 93/100
There is no doubt he ( actually , its a she now ) have issues . Maybe they were able to resolve them after 2010 , I would not know .
And I live in Belgium , same transportation as France ( direct , from the cellars , on release , temperature controlled cellars ) . To blame these issues on transportation is just not so .
John , I stopped buying Dauvissat here in Belgium because of premox . Transportation is NOT the issue . It’s Dauvissat . William , who’s opinion I also value greatly , may have been lucky but we have not .
Recent premoxed Dauvissat’s : Clos 2008 , Preuses 08 , Preuses 05 , Clos 2000 , Clos 2006 . All bought on release . Dauvissat makes wonderful wines but his premox % is ( or was ) too high .
I totally agree, But sometimes wildly different premox experiences between those whose wines go a long distance, and those whose wines have barely moved sometimes makes the discussion more complicated. I imagine that this also in part contributed to the glacial pace at which producers accepted that there was a problem.
I cant say as I never asked the question to the domaine. I tend to believe this is original bottling. The domaine used to keep a bit in past years given low volumes. A way to smoothen the financial loss (if any)
Thank you Don for providing the most rigorous and unbiased view of the quality issues that blight White Burgundy and for doing it year in, year out.
There is a clear message in your results that closures do matter despite the other many and varied influences on the resilience of wine to oxidation and other faults. Certainly the Diam 30 closures are much harder to extract than many of the corks I have seen in bottles both oxidised and pristine over the last 10-15 years suggesting a better and more resilient seal. I remain perplexed by the failure of good and justifiably respected reviewers like Meadows and Tanzer to simply state the proposed or actual closure of reviewed White Burgundy. Its like reviewing a car without a comment about mechanical reliability ! It would seem uncontroversial and allows the review of what is tasted as a young wine to stand on its own. It would create consumer pressure on recalcitrants like Boillot who really are betraying their terroir and their customers with their failure to acknowledge and change.
Thank you for also addressing the “BS” misinformation on Diam about taint etc that is put about. I would rather take a chance on a rare possible future event than tolerate the real and present danger of TCA and premox. As a Physician this is simple risk assessment and decision making !
Finally while travel across the world ( and in my case to OZ ) has its issues, premox certainly occurs in wines I’ve had in the UK and in France. A well known German winemaker confided that his regular cases of Leflaive transported in autumn in his car from Puligny to the Mosel were often showing signs of premox the following year at first taste. Keep calling it out and finally most of the makers will follow the lead of those switching to more effective closures.
It is not really a list of producers, it is a list of specific eligible wines. The objective is to get the top 60-75 wines from the vintage into the dinners each year. There are also a finite number of slots for each appellation. For example, on night one, we usually taste 8 Chablis, 16 Meursaults (usually a flight of MP and a flight of various 1ers), and 8 Corton Charlemagnes. On night two, we have up to 8 Bienvenues and Criots in one flight, up to 8 Batard (in most years), and up to 16 Chevalier Montrachet in two flights. Sometimes, like maybe in 2012, we end up with somewhat fewer Chevaliers and more Batards in the final mix.
I prepare and circulate a spreadsheet that lists the “eligible” wines in an order of preference. Again, the objective is to try to get all of the consensus best wines included, not just 8 examples from each appellation. So, to put the list together, I look at the critics’ reviews on the top wines as a preliminary screen, plus my own notes. I know most of the critics (like Jasper) and I sometimes seek specific input from them on the particular vintage in question beyond what they have written. I also solicit the views of some friends in the trade in Europe who regularly visit the domaines and keep me advised of new developments among the producers. I try to make sure I’m not missing wines that should be on the eligible list even if they are not frequently reviewed by all of the critics (e.g. Fabien Coche Batard and MP and in the past wines like Vincent Dancer and De Chersey’s Meursault Blagny En Genelotte – thanks to Jasper for the latter one). For the 2012 eligible list for night one there are 15 Chablis, 28 Meursaults, and 17 Corton Charlemagnes. For night two there are 14 Bienvenues and Criots on the eligible list, 23 Batards, and 25 Chevalier Montrachets.
The “Mostly Montrachet” dinners work differently. The wines for this dinner have assigned values based on their Wine Market Journal average net to seller numbers for the previous year. The value of the contributions are pooled and divided evenly among the attendees. So, depending on the participant’s contribution(s), he or she may either owe money to the pool or receive money back from the pool. The “eligible list” is usually most of the Montrachets made, plus the top two or three Coche-Dury wines, plus Leroy Corton and, until recently, D’Auvennay Criots and Chevy. I usually have a “restricted” list for this tasting which includes both some of the worst premox offenders (e.g. Blain-Gagnard, Fontaine-Gagnard), wines which I consider very high risk due to their high pricing and highly suspect past premox performance (e.g. Lafon Montrachet and Le Moine Montachet) or pricing that is just too insane to include in the dinner (e.g. DRC Montrachet and in recent years D’Auvennay). Morey-Blanc (Pierre Morey) has been on the eligible list several times, but no one has ever offered or brought one. We limit the attendees to 10 for this dinner, so the pours are larger. We usually have about 15 wines at this dinner which generally includes a ringer or two. The market values on the top wines have jumped so dramatically in the past few years that it has become very difficult to include both Coche Corton and Coche MP, plus Ramonet Monty and Colin-Morey Monty in the same dinner and to keep the average contribution value under $1,000. More than once myself and other contributors have taken haircuts on the value of contributed wines so that we can try to include all of the major players in that dinner.
Thanks for the kind words. As I’ve explained to a few people, I got involved in this issue back in 2003-2004 largely as a matter of self-protection because my wife and I both love white burgundy and wanted to be able to keep buying it. In the long run, it turned into a public service venture.
Starting in 2003, when the 1995 vintage was just over 7 years old, I found myself with an overwhelming number of dying or dead 1995s in my cellar. I couldn’t figure it out, because my older wines from 1989, 1990 and 1993 were fine. I looked for answers but found nothing. One of the things that I had noticed was that some producers seemed to have essentially no oxidation problem (e.g. Raveneau, Coche-Dury, Leroy and, from 1995 to 1999, Jadot) while other producers had extremely high failure rates even by age eight. I latched onto those differences like a bulldog and just wouldn’t let go. The first public commentary about the premature oxidation problem occurred in September of 2004 in Issue 116 of Steve Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar. Two months later, in Issue 16 of Burghound, Allen Meadows had an extended discussion of the issue. Sometime in 2004 a thread about premature oxidation started on the old Mark Squires Bulletin Board on e-Robert Parker in which Guillaume Deschamps and I and many others actively participated. The thread was the most active one on the Parker website for several years. At one point Charles Smith suggested in that thread that we should start a website that would contain a list of producers and wines where people could report their experiences as to whether the wines were sound or not at the time of consumption and to have more information about differences in producer incidence. Guillaume Deschamps did the work to set up the website and asked me to assist him in providing content for it. That became the Oxidized Burgundies Wiki Site. A couple of my LA burgundy friends suggested that I should organize a tasting of the 1996 vintage at age 10 to see what was oxidized and what wasn’t. That dinner, held in 2006, became the first of what is now the annual series of dinners.
I know most of the wine critics, and I have both asked them for information about producer practices and have also nagged them to report the details about each producer’s wine-making and sulfiting details. Without their assistance and cooperation, we wouldn’t have nearly as much information as we do today. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that because the critics need to have access to the domaines to taste the wines, there is no way that the critics can candidly report about which producers have premox problems – at least not if they want to be able to continue to visit that domaine. Believe me, there are some producers who simply do not want to talk about premox or the details about their sulfiting practices, and they just do not discuss those issues. I have offended a few domaines along the way. A very good friend of mine who has participated in many of these dinners over the years went to burgundy some years ago armed with a very detailed list of information I wanted to find out from the producers that he was going to visit. After the second visit on the first day arranged by a very well known burgundy courtier, the courtier took him aside and told him bluntly that either he had to stop asking questions about premox and sulfiting practices, or the rest of his scheduled cellar visits were cancelled. Things have improved somewhat since then and some producers will very candidly discuss premox with you and tell you exactly what they do and don’t do. But for a number of producers it is still not a topic they want to discuss.
Allen Meadows generally does list which producers use DIAM closures. Vinous sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t list that information in the tasting notes. I do maintain a list of the producers that I know about who are using DIAM (other than those using it only for their low end or entry level wines) on the wiki site, which you’ll find here: start [Oxidized Burgundies]
Thanks. I always find your tastings very informative and they have influenced my purchases of white Burgundies. I have found it interesting that the wines have included Meursaults other than Perrieres (which is essentially a grand cru) but not some of the better premier crus from PM and CM. To me, some of the better smaller producers (and even Ramonet) really shine with these wines where they small substantial holdings - see Jasper Morris’ comment re Moreau.
You are quite correct about Chassagne and Puligny. There are some really excellent ones out there, although fewer Chassagnes I suspect. Trying to include them as a flight (or two flights) does create logistical problems however, unless I eliminate the Chablis flight. (I have on occasion considered that since the Chablis are often in an awkward stage at age 7.5.) One year I did include a flight of Chassagne and Puligny wines on night one. We had five flights instead of four. But that made the dinner last too long. I anticipate that the insane price inflation of the grands crus will force changes in the format of the dinners as I know that many people have stopped buying the grand crus after 2014. I’m still buying what I can, but I just can’t/won’t pay some of the ridiculous current asking prices on wines I’ve bought for decades (e.g. Ramonet and Sauzet grand crus). All of this may make it easier to include Chassagne and Puligny in some type of revised format going forward.
If you have the time and inclination, I would be very interested to see your suggested list of what the eligible wines might look like for a list of say 15-16 Chassagnes and a similarly sized group of Pulignys. It’s not possible for me to do that for 2012 obviously.
For me, producers would not be that shockingly different and would include Ramonet and Bernard Moreau in Chassagne; Carillon and Sauzet in Puligny and Drouhin and Marc Colin in both. I would also want to try some producers that are newer to me like Heitz Lochardet and Caroline Morey ( wines seem very promising to me but I have so far only tasted these young). For a producer to add for Meursault, I love the wines of Buisson Charles (Patrick Essa). I think these wines would do very well in comparison with the wines from Chablis and Meursault, with only a few exceptions.
I love Leflaive’s wines but am too scared to hold them to include them on this list.
I think this may explain why you have never had an oxidized Pierre Morey. Either the late releases are reconditioned or quality control is quite good and they are only releasing late the ones that are not oxidized (screening by color). The ones that look good at year 10 should continue to last.
Thanks once again, Don, for the excellent and informative notes. I must say, it’s disappointing to see there are those with the hubris and rudeness to critizise your approach and comments. This is the best, broadest survey of each white burgundy vintage publicly available. Is it “statistically significant”? Who cares! People should feel free to organise their own events and publish their results, if they think they can do better (or would simply enjoy it). In the meantime, these are the best available data points to add to my own experience. I might have to pop over for the 2022 event if it’s still running
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