AG's Clos Du Val score 95 points

[larry_schaffer]

@Mel Knox

The Coravin idea could save a lot of money. That could enable some of you to do it at home.
I don’t know that any experiment done with actual tasters is going to be perfect. But I would put it another way: did any of the experiments Tom and I performed prove the idea that wine improves with aeration??

And herein lies one of the problems - define ‘improves’ please

Half joking but half not. Someone who prefers big structured, more powerful wines may very well feel that a wine that is not aerated is better and will NOT improve, for it may soften, etc . . .

All I know is that with my wines, they do tend to ‘improve’ (my definition - open up, become more expansive aromatically, broaden in the palate) with air.

Cheers.

[Mel_Knox]

Larry,

Sometime around 1984 there was a cool climate pinot noir conference in Oregon. Somebody asked Prof Bernard (the guy who got us all the Dijon clones) to define quality. He basically said:
We are Burgundian
We drink Burgundy wine all the time.
We know what is good!


But you are right. Quality is hard to define. We just asked for preferences. Rate the wines 1,2,3.

[MitchTallan]

I don’t give a rat’s patoot in general, but I was hoping the second and third page of this thread would contain some more reliable information regarding the AG score (is it another Sierra Carche deception). Instead, pages two and three devolved into a drift the size encountered in Minnesota in January. I still hope to find out why someone as knowledgeable as Mr. Galloni would somehow think that after all this time, CdV miraculously changed it’s well worn track/house style. I would love to know how these K+L salespeople were so suddenly taken with the alleged wine as well. There are just too many little, but nice juicy undercurrents that are involved here; an under-performing winery that we all kind of appreciate and root for (like Freemark Abbey, for example), a high profile reviewer who ought to know better and might have been somehow duped, and the piling on by a well known retailer that seems to place commerce way above reputation, using scores and verisimilitude-personal reviews by salespeople-to move pallets of wine.

[John_Morris]

@larry schaffer

@Mel Knox

The Coravin idea could save a lot of money. That could enable some of you to do it at home.
I don’t know that any experiment done with actual tasters is going to be perfect. But I would put it another way: did any of the experiments Tom and I performed prove the idea that wine improves with aeration??

And herein lies one of the problems - define ‘improves’ please

Half joking but half not. Someone who prefers big structured, more powerful wines may very well feel that a wine that is not aerated is better and will NOT improve, for it may soften, etc . . .

All I know is that with my wines, they do tend to ‘improve’ (my definition - open up, become more expansive aromatically, broaden in the palate) with air.

Cheers.

It’s always seemed to me that relatively high acid wines like Burgundy, Northern Rhones and Barolo benefit most from substantial decanting. I’m not sure why that it, but perhaps because they don’t have all the fruit aromas of riper wines that come up immediately.

[Keith_Levenberg]

The Sierra Carche reference doesn’t fit. That was the winery deliberately bottling and marketing a wine different from what they poured the reviewer, under the same label, surely well aware that the new wine would be purchased by people following the reviews. Has there been any suggestion here that Clos du Val deliberately slipped Antonio a special-sauce cuvee to get an inflated score? I don’t think so. It’s just Antonio failing to keep track of what he tasted.

[John_Morris]

@Keith Levenberg

The Sierra Carche reference doesn’t fit. That was the winery deliberately bottling and marketing a wine different from what they poured the reviewer, under the same label, surely well aware that the new wine would be purchased by people following the reviews.

I think you’ve got the facts wrong.

(Big) Jay Miller suggested, without any evidence, that the promoters must have poured him a different wine than they sold – after Rob Kenney sent him a bottle that Miller pronounced to be vile. In other words, Miller blamed the marketers rather than his own critical skills for the disparity between his score (96??) and the wine six months or a year after the review.

Having attended the Dan Posner blind tasting where where five or six bottles of CS were opened, I think it was just a big, fat ugly wine that went rogue. Each bottle we tasted was defective in different ways and degrees.

So I doubt there was a bait and switch on Miller.

[DougS]

@Glen Gold

When I stood in the aisles of Bevmo and saw a bottle that Wilfred Wong had given 88 points, I understood I was looking at the result of a shoe someone had boiled in ether.

[Gary_Ahearn]

The latest from AG:
"This review is for the Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley, and not one of the other Cabernet Sauvignon bottlings Clos du Val has made over the years. Last updated: November 5. 2015.

We keep digital records of every wine I taste, but to be 100% sure, I went back and looked over everything myself."

Apparently, Clos du Val did not make a Reserve or Stag’s Leap wine in 2013. All the fruit went into the regular wine.

[Thomas_Concilio]

@larry schaffer

Bill,

Not to get argumentative, but heck, why not . . . .

So decanting should only be used with older wines or wines that may have sediment? Never to aerate?

Ducking . . .

Aw, Snap!

[Chris_Seiber]

@Gary Ahearn

The latest from AG:
"This review is for the Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley, and not one of the other Cabernet Sauvignon bottlings Clos du Val has made over the years. Last updated: November 5. 2015.

We keep digital records of every wine I taste, but to be 100% sure, I went back and looked over everything myself."

Apparently, Clos du Val did not make a Reserve or Stag’s Leap wine in 2013. All the fruit went into the regular wine.

I guess if you want a silver lining, at least point chasing on this one will lead you to something that tastes like cabernet and like wine, as opposed to the 2012 Caymus.

Anyone know what scores other critics gave this 2013 Clos du Val?

[Carlos_Duarte]

What is the production?

[Kris_Patten]

@Carlos Duarte

What is the production?

30k. But that is with no SLD or Reserve bottling in 2013.

[Keith_Levenberg]

@John Morris

@Keith Levenberg

The Sierra Carche reference doesn’t fit. That was the winery deliberately bottling and marketing a wine different from what they poured the reviewer, under the same label, surely well aware that the new wine would be purchased by people following the reviews.

I think you’ve got the facts wrong.

(Big) Jay Miller suggested, without any evidence, that the promoters must have poured him a different wine than they sold – after Rob Kenney sent him a bottle that Miller pronounced to be vile.

That’s not my understanding. This 2009 Felix Salmon article seems to have the importer confirming that different wine was sold under the same label. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/24/we-are-searching-for-a-different-winery-for-this-brand/ I don’t know if that’s B.S. or not, but I am pretty sure there was a lot more to the story than BJM making excuses for giving 96 points to a crappy wine.

[Bill_Klapp_deactivated]

Two questions for you Napa insiders who follow Clos du Val:

1. Does Parker still taste Clos du Val wines, and if so, did he rate the wine in question?

2. Any idea why, in what both Parker and Galloni have declared The Napa Vintage Of All Eternity And A Day, Clos du Val elected not to make SLD or reserve wines and dumped all of their juice into a single bottling? Possibly related to the winemaker change?

[Bill_Klapp_deactivated]

@Kevin Porter

Way out of my depth here, but I always thought that the studies that ‘proved’ no benefit from letting wines breath were focused on just pulling the cork, which is not decanting. I remember reading a convincing argument that the small aperture allowed very little of the wine to contact air. Hence removing a little wine when ‘audozing’ (sp?) or pouring into a vessel with a wider neck.

Perfectly within your depth, Kevin.

Without benefit of a single experiment, common sense tells us that aeration of anything requires surface exposure of the substance being aerated. When aerating a golf course, the greenskeeper does not run the machine with the spikes over one 100-foot-square area and ignore the rest of the course. Unless Audouze shakes his bottles every few minutes to allow oxygenation of the wine, he has perpetuated a myth that those who dote upon his romantic BSing over dead or nearly dead ancient bottles have bought into. Even if you pour the wine down to full bottle diameter, the surface exposure is insufficient to allow the wine to open in the bottle. I suspect that those who subscribe to Audouzing are actually aerating in the glass only and attributing it to Audouzing. (A duck-style decanter offers a relatively small neck, but allows roughly half of the bottle of wine to be exposed to what air enters the decanter. The Erlenmeyer flask-style decanter offers a larger-diameter opening and even greater surface exposure.) And, of course, Audouzing ignores hard science on the potentially negative interaction between dregs still in contact with the wine and oxygen…

[Kris_Patten]

@Bill Klapp

Two questions for you Napa insiders who follow Clos du Val:

1. Does Parker still taste Clos du Val wines, and if so, did he rate the wine in question?

2. Any idea why, in what both Parker and Galloni have declared The Napa Vintage Of All Eternity And A Day, Clos du Val elected not to make SLD or reserve wines and dumped all of their juice into a single bottling? Possibly related to the winemaker change?

Parker doesn’t taste there AFAIK. They still make wines more in line with Dunn, Forman, Heitz, or Mayacamas than Harlan or Scarecrow. Recent vintages would be Parker 2009 - 90, 2010 - 86.

They didn’t get press forever and have been reducing production under the new winemaking team which recently included the former Rhys winemaker Jason Jardine. The wines from the Bernard Portet days resembled Faiveley in the 90’s and Rubicon in the 80’s, hard, iron driven with little hope of fruit ever catching the tannin.

They are far from fruit bombs, but try them for yourselves. Old school Cabs that need time…the wines from the 70’s thru 80’s are mature, wines like 1997 are still a ways away.

[Alan_Rath]

@TomHill

And folks swear by Venturis and such.

Personally I prefer magnets. I like the energy they impart, and it seems to make my date much more attractive.

Waterhouse’s thoughts on aeration have been around for a while, I’ve posted this link numerous times:

http://www.curiouscook.com/site/2009/01/for-a-tastier-wine-the-next-trick-involves-.html

Lawyers should stick to lawyering, scientists should stick to sciencing…

[Bruce_Leiser_owitz]

@Keith Levenberg

@John Morris

@Keith Levenberg

The Sierra Carche reference doesn’t fit. That was the winery deliberately bottling and marketing a wine different from what they poured the reviewer, under the same label, surely well aware that the new wine would be purchased by people following the reviews.

I think you’ve got the facts wrong.

(Big) Jay Miller suggested, without any evidence, that the promoters must have poured him a different wine than they sold – after Rob Kenney sent him a bottle that Miller pronounced to be vile.

That’s not my understanding. This 2009 Felix Salmon article seems to have the importer confirming that different wine was sold under the same label. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/24/we-are-searching-for-a-different-winery-for-this-brand/ I don’t know if that’s B.S. or not, but I am pretty sure there was a lot more to the story than BJM making excuses for giving 96 points to a crappy wine.

Sierra Carche was not a pre-existing winery or vineyard; it was a proprietary brand that had been recently created (and which was then reviewed in the WA). Since it wasn’t pre-existing “estate fruit,” someone could put a different blend from a different source in the same bottle and still call it Sierra Carche.

Bruce

[John_Davis]

@Kris Patten

@Bill Klapp

Two questions for you Napa insiders who follow Clos du Val:
They are far from fruit bombs, but try them for yourselves. Old school Cabs that need time…the wines from the 70’s thru 80’s are mature, wines like 1997 are still a ways away.

First winery I ever visited in Napa. Probably 1993 or 1994. Great tour tasting and wonderful host. Anyway, I’ve had the 90, 91 and 92 in the last year and all are certainly alive and fully mature. I’ve had many over their wines over the years and stylistically I’m not sure they’ve been consistent since the 90s. I’d like to see that return because with some age they really develop some great flavors. But, it is old school, and with that it isn’t necessarily going to please certain palates.

JD

[Arv_R]

@Kris Patten

@Bill Klapp

Two questions for you Napa insiders who follow Clos du Val:

1. Does Parker still taste Clos du Val wines, and if so, did he rate the wine in question?

2. Any idea why, in what both Parker and Galloni have declared The Napa Vintage Of All Eternity And A Day, Clos du Val elected not to make SLD or reserve wines and dumped all of their juice into a single bottling? Possibly related to the winemaker change?

Parker doesn’t taste there AFAIK. They still make wines more in line with Dunn, Forman, Heitz, or Mayacamas than Harlan or Scarecrow. Recent vintages would be Parker 2009 - 90, 2010 - 86.

They didn’t get press forever and have been reducing production under the new winemaking team which recently included the former Rhys winemaker Jason Jardine. The wines from the Bernard Portet days resembled Faiveley in the 90’s and Rubicon in the 80’s, hard, iron driven with little hope of fruit ever catching the tannin.

They are far from fruit bombs, but try them for yourselves. Old school Cabs that need time…the wines from the 70’s thru 80’s are mature, wines like 1997 are still a ways away.

Great color on these - thanks Kris.