I’m hosting our wine club in March. Here is the Burg bracket:
Chevillon Bousselots 1996
Chevillon Chaignots 2001
Laurent Lavaux St Jacques 2002
Bertagna Vougeot 1999
My initial thoughts - very unscientific - are to open them 4 hours before serving, tip them into decanters (pouring off sediment), give the Bertagna 1.5 hours in the decanter and the rest 1 hour, then back into the bottles, cork in, and pull the cork 30 mins before serving.
Too fussy? Any missteps? Any guidance gratefully received.
Nick, that sounds fine - a lot of steps - but fine. Easier way could be just opening all 2 hours in advance and let it sit there. Or, just pour into decanter an hour in advance. If anything, the 2002 may need a bit more air than the rest. I’m sure others who have had much more experience than me in those vintages can chime in. Are you going to be serving dinner with this? Or just wine? If dinner is involved, the wine will evolve throughout the night . . . so keep that in mind when deciding when to pull the cork. Have fun and enjoy!
Sure you can do it as you think, and others will give different recs, but my suggestion is:
Pull the cork 5 h in advance, taste a little amount (for cork taint etc), put back the rest and leave it (opening covered with a tissue).
After 5 h of slow-oxing either decant for removing sediment - or not at all, and serve immediately.
Then watch the wines in the glass.
If you decant right after opening there is the possibility that the wines can get a hard edge to the tannins … which should be omitted thru slow-ox … (the Chevillons can be still quite hard …)
Depends on whether you want to aerate…and your goals. Pulling corks = pop and pour, IMO. Nothing happens. I have nothing against pop and pour, FWIW, it’s just that I would expect such wines to shut down with an hour or 1.5 hours in decanter. I think either pop and pour…and clean through paper filter…or longer aeration tbd by you own tastes. You want open wine to taste.
If you’re mainly going to taste for an hour or so…nothing wrong with pop and pour…or just pulling cork and watch them “unfurl”…though if not cleaned of sediment…that could pollute the experience.
Thanks all. The goal is to have open wine to taste over a 30 - 45 minute period. For better or worse, our table typically doesn’t follow a wine over longer than 45 minutes - we finish one bracket and roll onto the next (which is shiraz). The wines will be in cleanskin bottles and get passed around for each to pour his/her own, with a little pourer. The wine wont have much time to breathe up in the glass so I’m hoping to have it as close to ready as possible right from the pour. I’m clearly pretty inexperienced when it comes to Burg, but I don’t think Kent’s ‘pop…then pour’ will give the wine enough air before being consumed to achieve my goal.
Meo Camuzet (burg producer) has a page on decanting red burgs (included below) that is well thought out (imo), and addresses your situation.
The summary: if you’re having a bottle over the entire meal, they suggest pop and pour and enjoy how it opens up and evolves over the evening.
When a bottle is to go with a specific course, as in your situation Nick, they suggest: 2 hours before hand, open the bottle, pour a glass and pour it back in the bottle (with a funnel, or whatever), repeat this with a second glass. Pour the glasses of wine carefully to not disturb any sediment. If needed, decant off the sediment immediately prior to the course. They talk about pop and pour being insufficient air for the task here, and full decanting being too much (using the goldilocks theorem).
Meo’s suggestions match my experience of what works well (both with burgundy and structured west coast Pinots).
Brilliant, thanks Eric. Doesn’t look too far away from Gerhard’s method. They don’t say when to put the glasses back into the bottle, but if the idea is to avoid a decant then agree fairly quickly is the answer.
Yes, pour the glasses of wine back in the bottle immediately. It’s the pouring action back and forth that gets the desired amount of air into the wine. Referred to a double decant (or in this case, and half double decant ).
And you’re right, this is very similar to Gerhard’s method.
I agree with the double-decant advice generally. I usually sample a small amount upon opening and generally go to the d-d if the wine is pretty young. Most older wines don’t benefit much from it (other than filtering sediment) in my view.
Make sure that your decanters have ZERO soap stains.
Any soap stains in the decanter will make the wine taste corked.
And most decanter shapes are essentially impossible to clean, unless maybe you can find something like a very large graduated cylinder from a chemistry lab, which is wide enough that you can get your hand [and forearm] into it, all the way down to the bottom.
Also, I like to clean with an Ammonia-based agent, like Windex, to kill any remaining chlorine molecules on the surface of the glass.
This goes for stems as well, but NEVER put your naked fingers inside a stem - the stem will shatter on you, and take your fingers right off [been there, done that].
This.
These wines are meant to be drunk over the course of a meal which lasts for hours, if not days.
Trying to simultaneously force each individual wine into the very apogee of its oxidation curve, so that the collective wines can be speed-sampled in a mass tasting, is an exercise in futility.
The best tastings are when you’ve got a house at the beach or the mountains, for at least a week, and you and your family and friends can start sipping on the wines at noon, and then keep following the wines during not just the afternoon and evening hours, but over the course of the entire week, so that you can see how many days each wine needs before it really starts strutting its stuff.
Yes…if you have the resources…you can hire round the clock sentries to monitor things. (Unless some of your guests are insomniacs.) A time-lapse video camera that could show the effect of the aeration over that week…would be helpful too. (And, almost as exciting as the pictures of full and empty bottles of wines that so many people post on WB to, I guess, prove that they aren’t lying about which wines they’ve tasted?)
Oh, and, as the esteemed JN Meo says…hide the process from your guests…it’s ugly: “not very elegant and suggest it should be done in the kitchen!”
Never sacrifice “elegance” is my mantra…for decanting.
Something I’ve long wondered, and since you seem to be an aspiring philospher…is how can anything be “post-modern” when “modern” is current?
adjective
1.
of or relating to present and recent time; not ancient or remote:
modern city life.
2.
characteristic of present and recent time; contemporary
).