Ed, what I’ve heard is that the taint gets into the vines themselves and can affect the fruit from the vintage after the actual smoke damage, though I don’t know much about this and get the impression that this doesn’t happen all the time. But that’s a good point about barrels - I’d be wary of re-using barrels that had badly smoke-tainted wine in them.
Ed - I hadn;t really thought about the barrel angle for smoke taint. That could be an interesting problem.
Neil from Littorai indicated the second year was in the plant. I forgot the plant chemistry but somehow, the plant absorbs some of that smoke and stores it releasing it into the fruit in year two…albeit at a lesser impact than year 1.
Will be interesting to follow.
Fascinating about the smoke taint. Total thread ‘drift’ but I would be interested in learning more about this, perhaps in a separate thread?
Linda, I too am amazed by the number of early release bottlings lately. But as Nate and others have pointed out, perhaps some wines simply don’t benefit all that much from extended barrel aging, however romantic and traditional it may be?
That being said, we are just now bottling some of our 2007 zins, and the Rhones are slated for bottling in June, release in September. Same schedule as always, with one notable exception … last year we bumped up the bottling of the Cujo zin blend because we noted that our distributor was burning through it every year by the following January (nine months from release). So to keep the channels flowing, we have started bottling it in September (four months earlier) to give it some bottle age before release. Since the Cujo is our fruit-and-pepper focused wine it makes more sense to give it some bottle age before release than a few more months in barrel.
I understand market demands and restrictions forcing people to bottle earlier to keep from losing shelf space, but at the ‘limited distribution’ end of the spectrum, time in barrel needs to be vintage specific, IMHO. The last two vintages are a great example of this, I think. 2006 wines were ready earlier, as they were somewhat more delicate with average structure. For us, 2007 was the total opposite, with tremendous structure and concentration right out of the gate. To age these two vintages the same with such different starting material would be a mistake IMHO. There’s so much more that goes into it too, like how long are they on the lees? How often do you rack? Top? Stir? 12 months in barrel at winery A can produce completely different effects on the wine than 12 months at winery B, as the handling during the aging can be completely different.
We’ve bottled our wines after 10 (or so) months in barrel ever since our first vintage of 1999. Why? Because we like to retain the bigger, brighter fruit profile. Aging longer in barrel (in my opinion) tends to soften the fruit impact. While I love a lot of Pinots that are aged in barrel longer, we like what 10 months does. The cool thing is that we don’t have 2 vintages in barrel at once. That helps keep costs down, which translates to a lower selling price. If we preferred longer barrel aging, we’d have done that and re-defined our business plan - which probably would have included higher prices. We got lucky that our palates led us to a more (cost) efficient process.
Palate alignment with cost efficiency is fine with me. As for cash flow, it seems there is a better way to approach the financial issue if the wine needs more time. There is also a level of assumption that wines delivered earlier will be consumed earlier, maturity be damned. This is when futures may work well. And if the trend continues I wonder if the style will continue to wines made for earlier drinking.