I typically drink 1st cru red as that’s my sweet spot but occasionally I’ll do village wines that purportedly box above their weight, namely premium lieu dits. One thing I notice is that while both often deliver a very good first nite experience the villages tend to trail off a bit more on the second and third nite compared to the premiere. It’s like ultimately the site quality limits the longevity once the bottle has opened. I don’t use a Corvin and reseal the bottle but that’s another discussion. Anyone notice a similar effect?
It’s really unusual that wine lasts until night 2 here (if we’re not going to drink a lot we’ll open a 375 and with people over bottles are almost always finished) but I haven’t noticed that, although the village wines I drink tend to be very good ones.
In very general terms and IMO, red burgs are never better in day 2 and should never see a day three. It’s not a red burg anymore at that point. Oxidation is not friendly to this category, even in a relatively short time frame.
I mostly drink older vintages so YMMV on current releases
Couldn’t this be said for most wines?
Some cabs might be better with multiple days of air.
I think it’s about tannins and “weight” that the higher Crus have that allows them to hold up better. But it’s not just limited to higher Crus, some producers/vintages that made a more dense wine can also stand up to more air. A 2020 Barthod would probably be just fine on day 3 - and might still be impenetrable.
There’s all sorts of stuff that does well with a bit of time. Just in the last couple weeks I opened a Manzanilla sherry that improved Day 1 through 5. Best glass was the last.
Last night I opened a bottle of Enviante Migan which smelled like an open sewer running through a horse stable in 100 degree heat…all the tasting notes I’ve read say this it to be expected, close it back up and check on night two for the magic.
Although I do agree re red Burgundy, I always enjoy them most on night 1 with just the right amount of air.
Premier Cru Burgundies hold up better over 2–3 days because they possess a higher concentration of tanins, extract and acidity. These core structural elements act as natural antioxidants, protecting the wine from breaking down when exposed to air and oxygen after the cork is pulled. That’s my belief anyway. And sometimes a wine improves on the second day much like decanting helps a wine.
Isn’t that what I just said? But mine wasn’t AI generated.
Why are all Enviante wines like this?
This is a gross generalization. Some do, some don’t. There are lots of producers making their wines more or less exactly the same way throughout the range, no matter if the grapes come from village, 1er Cru or Grand Cru level vineyards. Some might have wines where the village level wines can be more rustic with more tannins, whereas the higher Crus might show more finesse with a less amount of fine tannins. Or acidity or generalization. Not all producers make wines where the amount of tannins, extract and acidity go up as you go up the quality ladder.
Yeah, but I’ve found that this is rarely the case with red Burgundy.
Usually this is the case with Envinate’s (not Enviante) wines from Canary Islands. Volcanic soils usually make wines with lower pH and a propensity toward reduction, and Envinate’s style is typically quite reductive to begin with. The wines just need quite a bit of air to blow that reduction off - or just a clean copper coin dropped in the glass or the decanter!
Yes, this was the Migan Chingao which is the unsulfured red from Tenerife.
Yes. That’s why I said “most”, not “all”. ![]()
I agree with this. Judging a bottle of Burgundy on how it performs on a second night is a little bit like judging a surgeon by how good he good he looks in his scrubs.
If you are going to drink it the second night, decant half into a half bottle as much as you can, cork it and put it in the fridge.
Count me in the camp of red burgundy, and most red wine, almost never tasting good on day 2, let alone 3, regardless of preservation method (save by coravin). While stacked bottles may “hold up” in the sense that they don’t fall apart structurally, I find burgundy particularly susceptible to stale notes, which infect wines of all ages and levels. These notes can even appear quickly with longer decants or more extreme aeration methods.
Soapbox moment - I think there’s a pervasive, though hardly universal, notion on WB that giving wines air is a way to make up for opening them too soon, or even fixing unbalanced wines. “Give it lots of air” appears so often in notes, as do comments on long decants as a matter of course. I wonder if some of it is just that it makes some people feel more like Serious Wine Drinkers to open and decant hours ahead, even when they don’t know the wine at all. Sure, we all have to guess from time to time, and we all get it wrong sometimes. But I strongly disagree with the idea that most wine benefits from air via decanting. I don’t think it should be the default. After all - you can always give more air, you can never give it less!
1/2 the time i feel wine tastes better the second and sometimes the third day. These are usually the wines that need decanting
Totally agree.
Someone, I forget who, put it very inelegantly back a number of years “I think some people just like the taste of stale wine.”
Now, while I wouldn’t put it that way, I do think that some people are much more sensitive to stale notes than others, while on the flipside, some peeople consider anything that makes a wine less firm (I don’t want to say “more open” because that is not a well defined term) to be positive. So if one prioritizes that softening, for lack of a better word, and doesn’t really experience the oxidative or stale notes, I can see how day 2 or 3 wines would often seem better.
Where’s “Mr. Three Day Wine Report” when we need him, LOL.
While most things in wine are quite subjective, I agree with you that “tolerance / appreciation of bottles on day 2+” is one of the very most subjective.
People just react very differently to the way wine tastes after the first day, and then it’s often unpredictable how a specific wine at specific age and using a specific way of keeping the wine will show.
Though I feel like my statement above is much more the case with red (and sparkling) wines, and there is a narrower range of opinion about how still white wine holds up.
I generally agree with Sarah on this point, and generally recommend opening wines when they are ready to drink. I will say that the 2017 Tremblay cabottes was noticeably better on day 2, after vacuvin and being put in the fridge. That’s really the only wine I’ve noticed improving.