Rekindled our semi-monthly wine nights on Saturday evening. Pinot theme, all blind tasted by the crowd, scored, and averaged out at the end of the evening to see what wine came out on top and which ones that, well, didn’t. One of the latter was a 2014 Nuits St. Georges “La Richemone” from Javouhey, which I had purchased on a recent trip to Beaune. It was controversial, to say the least. Most notably for the nose that smelled like…farts. Some called it turpentine, others old socks, but it was super funky without question.
Has anyone had this or a similar wine? Is that a smell that one should have expected? Is this what “brett” smells like? Trying to figure out if the bottle was flawed or if this funk was an appreciable asset to the wine rather than something to recoil from.
For those who care, final order of scored wines are best on the left to worst on the right. An interesting note was that the Kosta Brown was unanimously declared to be an “obvious” Burgundy during the tasting. lol.
Great burgundy smells of shit." Thus, famously, wrote Anthony Hanson, Master of Wine, in the first edition of the Faber classic on the wines of Burgundy more than 20 years ago. Being neither sensationalist nor coprophiliac, Mr Hanson deleted the offending phrase from the second edition, but didn’t change his opinion
I may have skewed it. I kind of liked the farty one after the whiff blew away. Can’t recall producer of the savigny-les-beaune other than it said “aux vergelesses” on the label.
“Farts” sound like brett, but brett shouldn’t blow off. Turpentine and old socks don’t sound so bretty to me. Bottom line is, if you like it, fine. If you don’t like it, that’s fine as well. Personally I dislike and steer clear of burgundy with unclean characteristics. The Anthony Hanson quote is incredibly misleading.
Hey Loren, throw some notes up if you can please. I’ve had a couple different years of that Phelps Pinot and it’s showed great. Curious about the Flowers also.
unfortunately the host threw the notes out, but I remember some of the wines. The Phelps was my least favorite wine of the evening- mainly because it was so obviously warm climate Cali. My recollection was “big fruit, strawberry/raspberry. overtly thick”. Unfortunately I can’t recall more than that though. My favorite pick of the night was the Vosne-Romanee. it came in 2nd place overall, but I liked that it was “medium bodied, clearly warm year burgundy. Raspberry and plum skin(?) with light tannin dusting for chew”
I could be misremembering, but I recall him saying that he meant it when he wrote it, but by the time the second edition was released, cellar conditions had improved dramatically, and he liked the cleaner wines. Anyway, it’s an all-time great quote, great for “winning” arguments.
And herein will always lay the challenge of specific ‘notes’ - they will always mean different things to different folks.
I had someone on a zoom say that one of my Grenaches smelled ‘funky’ - I looked at him and said ‘It smells like George Clinton?’
To me, ‘farty’ would fall into the same category of ‘rotten eggs’ and would therefore be ‘reductive’ in nature - which is what others mentioned above. Brett does not blow off - it may ‘change’ as other compounds become more apparent, but just like with TCA and VA, they do not ‘disappear’ over time.
