Everyone has access to a wine lab, just keep some small screw cap sample bottles on hand, and mailers, and send in the sample to ETS. Ask for an ‘ethyl phenols panel.’ I believe they’ll even send you some sample bottles if you ask.
I was thinking of someone with a cellar of old Chaves they’re willing to open for the sake of science … and settling a Berserkers argument. 
It would also be important to send a couple of other wines that people consider not having any Bret to see if those say markers show up in those wines.
It’s not just whether they are there, but how they express themselves and in what quantities.
Yep, in traditional berserker manner, nothing is that simple or straightforward 
I’ve never had Chave Hermitage, but Syrah is my favorite grape variety and one of the things I’ve done at various jobs is analyze wines for Brett marker compounds. My experience is that Brett in Syrah tends to be very obvious, to my nose at least, as a 4-EP (band aid) character. I am skeptical that the meaty characters observed in Syrah are associated with Brett, for two main reasons. Forgive me, I’m going to put my chemist hat on, but I’m happy to talk through any of the technicalities more - as much as I can, at least - if people want more detail:
- Syrah is naturally high in volatile phenols that are not produced by Brett, and the concentrations of these compounds vary according to environmental, viticultural, and winemaking practices. An example of this is guaiacol, commonly associated with both smoke and toasted oak but found in naturally high levels in Syrah (but not most other grapes). Thiophenols, which form from the combination of natural volatile phenols with sulfur, are strongly associated with cooked meat flavors. We have very little information on the natural concentrations of thiophenols in Syrah grapes because they are super hard to measure. But none of these things are produced by Brett.
- Syrah is a grape that is very prone to reduction. This has a strong impact on sulfur chemistry in wine, and many of the compounds, like thiophenols, that are associated with the flavor of meat, are sulfur-containing compounds that are sensitive to the redox (reduction-oxidation state) of the wine.
The volatile phenols produced by Brett (mainly 4-EP, 4-EG, and 4-EC) have the effect of making wines taste more savory, both in the aromas they have and in their suppression of the wine’s other aromas. The fact that Syrah naturally has a lot of savory flavors in it (meat, game, pepper, olive, etc.) means that a little bit of Brett can feel quite complementary to the wines, but also means that savory non-Brett characters in the wines may be mistakenly ascribed to Brett. This is all complicated by the fact that a lot of Rhone Syrahs do have some Brett, so teasing out the differences is tricky stuff. This is one of many reasons that I harp on so much about trying to avoid using chemical descriptors in wine tasting unless you are absolutely sure of the source.
The New Zealand winemakers I’ve worked with have been extremely sensitive to “meaty” flavors in wine, not just in Syrah, and I have had a hard time determining what they mean. Because meat flavor is a complex thing and there are many ways in which a wine can smell/taste “meaty”, with different mechanistic origins.
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Thanks for that, Ben.
I can see the confusion.
I’ve been around people who made the claim of Brett, and it was as you describe. Not Brett, but the funky flavors of the grape.
As with many others here, I was rather surprised to see this claim being thrown about - I never detected any brett in Chave Hermitage, though I don’t recall tasting any younger than 2013 vintage. I do have a high tolerance for brett, and actually enjoy it a bit, so it’s possible I experienced it but did not notice, if it was slight.
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It took me years to recognize Brett as a distinct flavor because I grew up in the UK wine business, and bretty Bordeaux was our stock in trade. Now I recognize it and generally dislike it.
The bottles of Chave I’ve had from different vintages have been somewhat bretty but nonetheless brilliant.
Unlike some wine defects brett is really easy to quantify in a lab…
I’ve had only two vintages of Chave Hermitage (05 and 11) but neither had brett to my palate. Experts can chime in, but to me brett is pretty distinctive and not at all the same as the particular Northern Rhone Syrah expression (meat, bacon, black olive, herbs). Producers that have brett also tend to have the occasional bottle where it overwhelms the wine (eg Pegau), never heard of that with Chave.
This is a weird thread, you’ve got the great majority of people saying it’s not an issue and a few people claiming it’s ubiquitous. I suspect ‘brett’ means a different thing to them.
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The next time I open a Chave Hermitage I plan to get it tested. Could be a while so the thread may go into cold storage
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Hi Ben, so basically we can’t be sure either way without testing the wines?
From your perspective do you lean towards misdiagnosis or modest levels of Brett ?
thnx Brodue
I think that a lot of people ascribe savoury character of unknown origin to Brett, so Brett gets overdiagnosed. I know that there are some who believe in “good Brett” - which people mean to use either modest levels that add complexity, and/or some kind of Brett strain or Brett metabolism that is producing more positive outcomes. I don’t know about that, but I cannot confidently state that not to be true.
It’s made harder by the fact that a lot of these wines have a little bit of detectable Brett or Brett byproducts (4-ethyl phenols), but that doesn’t mean the Brett is causing the sensory experience. If the environment is such that Brett can get into the wine and survive, likely so can other things, and I think our understanding of wine microbiology is still pretty incomplete in that regard. Certainly mine is.
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Ben’s posts make me think of debates held before on the prevalence of brett in Cayuse syrahs. Some taster were claiming certain cuvees have had noticeable brett while others said they’ve never noticed any brett whatsoever in Cayuse. I’m in the latter camp. There may be similar factors going on with Chave as with Cayuse, and with other producers’ Walla Walla rocks syrahs, that the WW rocks terroir of olive/dust/sage/nori/coffee with a very heavy iron/blood signature gets mistaken for brett. A few of the wines with the most extreme WW rocks signature to me at one point made me think of canned sauerkraut for which I suspected microbiological contamination. Later those wines resolved into something less intense and made me think it wasn’t biological contamination at all making those wines so pungent when opened earlier.
Talked and tasted with an Italian oenologue last month, she critisized most wines for all kinds of faults, then presented a “perfect clean” red wine … it was extremely modern and boring, no character at all.
No, thanx!
A trio of UC Davis researchers published a brettanomyces wheel. Their report can be found at the link below. It’s an interesting read, and not very long, but essentially, various strains of brett can produce a wide array of both positive and negative characteristics in wine, from citrus and floral to swampy and fecal.
I doubt anyone would argue with this, but much like TCA and just about everything else for that matter, any given person has a different threshold for detecting/tasting any given characteristic from the next person, so we can all taste the same wine and have different experiences, and find or not find brett.
Hopefully this does not violate the rules- happy to remove if I have not properly done this. Link to the report:
Published by:
Joseph CML, Albino E and Bisson LF. 2017. Creation and use of a Brettanomyces Aroma Wheel. Catalyst 1:12- 20.
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Yes, it’s very similar. I was one who was confident about finding brett in Cayuse. Ben’s posts here have me wondering if I might have been wrong. Maybe I’ll send a couple of samples to ETS.
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Interesting. I don’t have a lot of experience with Cayuse but I’ve heard the same thing. The two examples I have had did not seem Bretty to me.
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When I was a student at UCD, I was involved in a sensory study whereby they took the same wine and ‘infected it’ with different strains of brett. I will say that some came across as ‘more pleasurable’ with scents of molasses and slight smokiness, whereas others were easily identifiable with brett like band aid and ‘horsey’. There was one strain that I vividly remember - it produced ‘putricide’ - smelled like ‘rotting flesh’- still nearly makes me physically ill thinking of smelling that.
That said, my guess is that we could do the same with ‘sulfur compounds’ and have a vast array of descriptors too. And yes, we all have different threseholds for picking up these ‘markers’.
I do believe it becomes ‘counterproductive’ to begin to call out ‘brett’ every time a wine has a smoky or ‘earthy’ quality to it. Just as it’s very frustrating to see notes of ‘must be slight TCA because the bottle didn’t show what was expected’.
Wines are so complex that sometimes it’s best not to ‘label’ issues and come up with a ‘cause’ - best to describe and let others do so . . .
Cheers
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Cayuse wines can ge very confounding because of the strong whole cluster/stem signature. That’s what dominates most Cayuse wines I’ve had, not brett.
I believe it’s more than just whole cluster/stem signature - plenty of wines out there made with whole cluster that don’t show those same characteristics. I do believe the soil up there leads to some unique characteristics, in the same way Etna wines do with very different descriptors.
This is what makes ‘the game of wine’ so fun - lots of potential ‘answers’ but very few definitive ones 
Cheers