The first bottle seemed dark with caramel and straw aromatics. I assumed premox but it seemed too early (c’mon 4 years!) so I opened another from the same case to verify. The second bottle was clear colored, SO2 laden, pristine and quite tight. More premox misery…and now even sooner. Unfortunately, I think this is proving my suspicion that the extra SO2 is not going to help prevent premox and in fact just hurts the wines.
Bottle 1 '05 H. Boillot Chassagne Montrachet Chenevottes-
Very mature nose of caramel, sweet corn and honey. On the palate this is not yet entirely premoxed and tries to emulate a mature White Burgundy with butterscotch and sherry. The backend is way to frayed and no 4 year Burgundy should seem like it is 30 years old. Still drinkable. Mid stage premox…wow! or Sh*t! or …
Bottle 2 '05 H. Boillot Chassagne Montrachet Chenevottes-
Clear light yellow color. Tight minerally nose that showed some SO2 at first. With air it showed great laser-like detail (especially for the vintage) and ripe fruit. This is too young but shows exceptional potential (which I doubt it will ever realize). Updated 1/17/11
Opened another bottle - premoxed. Nose of Hay, palate of caramel.
This was a wine that saw plenty of so2 and clearly that isn’t going to solve premox.
It is not like there were never any early-oxidized bottles in the past. Cork closures have always had a distribution of permeability with a few tailing outliers of complete failure. The premox problem is not acute, but a shifting of the variability curve dramatically to the left (and altering it some.)
Barring the accumulation of like data, I would sooner attribute this to a single point of cork failure than a systemic problem.
Sucks … Chenevottes is likely my favorite 1er from Chassagne though I like Bernard Morey’s version of this more than H. Boillot’s
Kevin - Did you ship your remaining stash of this wine to WineBid?
Crap! … I had a '01 Boillot Corton-Charlie for XMas and it showed beautifully. So I took another one to my in-laws. We opened it yesterday: dead. Completely dead…
I have quite a few 07’s. I will open them now. And slap my face at each sip for having bought them. Probably.
this is so crazy, it’s spent 4 years in the bottle tops and it’s oxidized already, how badly are they messing up that this happens? I freaking love white burgundy but it’s ridiculous that two buck chuck chardonnay could outlast some grandcru’s.
(quote) The juice is 4 years old but it’s only been in a bottle for two and a half or so, right?. Jeez most supermarket whites can manage that.[/quote]
Is my math wrong or is a 2005 white Burgundy now closing in on the start of year number six in a few days? 1996 white Burg notes from my archives started showing first signs of premox at age six, and the softer 1995s probably showed it even a bit earlier, but in those days we did not put that down to premox as we were just getting our toes wet with the phenomenon.
Kevin- Was there any visible difference in the corks of the two bottles of '05 Chenevottes? I have sometimes found a greenish-blue residue on corks of premoxed bottles and always wondered if this was indicative of something important. Would be curious to hear if you had noted any variations between the cork of the premoxed bottle and the sound bottle.
Someone asked if any white Burg producers were experimenting with Stelvin- Domaine Laroche in Chablis has been completely SC for several vintages now. Hunt down a few 2002s or 2004s from them and check out their beautiful patina of permanent reduction… pick your poison folks… I kind of lean towards the sherry of premox over the rotting cabbage, metallic overtones and new catalytic converter aromatics in the Laroche bottles. But to each his own. Truth is I have been drinking an awful lot of riesling the last half dozen years.
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