I was given a bottle of Bollinger RD 2002, but wanted to ask a more general question about such recently disgorged wines (like Dom P2, perhaps others).
Is the drinking window the same/similar to the regular disgorgement of the underlying vintage, or is it extended because it spent more time on the lees and prior to disgorgement?
I understand that Bollinger recommended the other way around. The regular bottles can be aged, but the RD bottles should be drunk immediately.
I have never been able to conduct a good enough experiment to know if that is true though!
This is exactly what I’ve heard as well. A wine that is kept for, say, 3 years on the lees is going to take quite a bit of years to reach that rich, vinous, nutty complexity, but instead will stay there for many years - decades, even.
On the other hand, a wine that is kept for 10 years on the lees normally reaches the peak complexity quite quickly post-disgorgement, but won’t stay there for as long.
I remember drinking Bollinger’s LGA 2002 and RD 2002 side-by-side quite soon after RD was released. LGA was impressive, but still very youthful. RD was on the next level in complexity, showing a lot more of those nutty and bready notes of autolysis. Way better than LGA. However, it seemed also more evolved in comparison, LGA showing a lot more potential for future development. Only later on I learned that this is actually what often happens - those late-disgorgement bottles are supposed to show their best soon after release, while the normal releases are the wines you want to fill your cellar with. While it takes a lot more time for them to reach their peak, their peaks can be higher than those of late-disgorged bottles.
People say this, but if the disgorgement is done well, I don’t think it’s true. I drank a not very recently R.D. 1973 Bollinger last year and it was great.
agree that the wine is fine down the road.
The answer is that it depends - and it really does. With Bollinger, I find that the RDs don’t necessarily get much better with age while the Grande Annees do and in most years I find the peak of a well cared for Grande Annee eventually tops the peak of an RD. With DP, the Plentitude (or Oenotheque or Late Disgorged) releases all develop very well after release. With Krug Collection, the wines also develop although I usually prefer a well aged original release. Complicating Krug Collection is that recent vintages are all late disgorgements, but going back in time, they were a mix of orginal disgorgement, later disgorgement, and recent disgorgement.
With many smaller producers or even some of the bigger ones, they will often do a recent disgorgement release just a few years after the original release (kind of like Bollinger does with the RD). When the original release of the wine has only seen 3-5 years of lees aging, I do think that you can find an uptick in quality with a later release, recent disgorgement that saw more lees aging (say 5-10 years). These seem to age nicely too.
You also have to remember that not all late release wines are always late disgorged wines or recent disgorged wines; many also see differences in terms of dosage, aging position, and/or closure for aging during the second fermentation (cork vs. crown). A recent example of a late disgorged, but not necessarily recently disgorged release is the Louis Roederer Cristal Vinotheque series. These wines see a lot more age on the lees than the original release before they are disgorged, but are then aged in the cellar post-disgorgement for many years before release.
You really have to go producer by producer as there is so much that you can do with the winemaking once the wine is in the bottle. The best reason in my book to buy any recent disgorgement or late release is for provenance. You know where the wine has been for many years. In most cases, smart money or the value play is to purchase the original release wine (assuming it saw enough lees aging) and cellar it yourself.
To generalize - If you are looking for an experience with a recently disgorged wine that will give you freshness, structure, and precision mixed with more bread, biscuit, nut based notes and usually a bit more dryness then pop the wine within a year or two of release. If you want the freshness to subside and the wine to relax a bit with drier, mineral, bread, biscuit, nut notes then cellar longer.
I am also a believer that there is an optimum time to disgorge a wine, but it isn’t always practical to do this or easy to figure out.
The logic applies to Port. LBV are early drinkers and early bottled VP keeps for decades.
Of course, William is going to tell us about an amazing 1883 LBV that he recently tasted. ![[rofl.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/a/a7452fcd8e675af869f8da01174474a545b03944.gif "rofl"){kind=small}
Edit: Just saw Brad’s incredibly complex reply. Wow. How lucky we are to have Brad and William on WB.
Not fully. Otherwise LBVs would be more expensive - or RDs dirt cheap. 