What’s up with that? Has anyone ever experienced that before? I mean, it tastes exactly like hydrogen peroxide. This is a first for me.
I wonder if this is somehow related to the terrible premox problems with Fevre’s Chablis. The last 00 Clos I had was horribly oxidized.
Wow Dan, that’s the first bad tasting note you ever posted. ![[scratch.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/4/42a16863a8714da3c1604419e3eb9206bb87aa50.gif "scratch"){kind=small}
Maybe someone forgot to rinse all the sodium percarbonate out of the barrels.
Crazy note, sorry to hear about your bad experience.
I was actually going to post something I just learned about premox, so glad this came up.
I met Mounir Saouma this week (man behind the negoctiant label Lucien Le Moine) who actually may be on to something. He experimented in the 2004 vintage with two wines he created from the same parcel (I can’t recall which one) and recently had members of the press taste both wines double blind. The general consensus was that one wine was much older than the other (needless to say, they were the exact same age and vineyard).
The difference, the type of press that was used. He mentioned that it was the pneumatic press that was causing the issue. His point was that it was too easy on the grapes, and there was quite a bit of juice left behind. Not sure if this “conspiracy theory” had been much discussed, but thought this was super interesting. Right or wrong, you had to love the man’s passion when speaking about the premox situation (and his own wine’s as well).
Well, that’s not entirely true, but I have been on a great run lately. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been drinking with you as much. (Oh, no I didn’t!) Speaking of which, now that you’re long vacation is over, maybe we can get back to serious drinking.
That’s interesting. I’d read on the “other board” some discussion of whether it was the pneumatic presses. I guess that was one of several changes a lot of wineries implemented around the time of the first bad premox vintages.
This was something I hadn’t experienced before.
I read an article in the RVF recently where Etienne de Montille was giving his opinion about the whole thing, I think he identified 5 factors, in no particular order: sulfur, batonnage, corks and… presses (and I can’t remember the 5th one). I think he mentioned in particular Coche Dury who still keeps a very old press and has had very few issues with premox.
Funny you mention Coche, as I have had some interesting conversations with folks at Kermit Lynch, and they have all said they have never come across a premoxed bottle of Coche.
Would be fun to put Etienne and Mounir in the same room for this conversation, would turn in to a battle royale!
Mounir did comment that sulfur becomes a necessary part of wines that go through the pneumatic press b/c the wines need the assistance. The wines become premoxed b/c the sulfur ultimately breaks down, and the wine is left on it’s own phenols to survive. Since the presses are not extracting all the phenols, the wine has a limited shelf life.
Had the 02 Fevre Les Clos @ The Marshall Store ~ 10 Days ago. While not overtly oxidized, much less pure H2O2, we did think the wine was older than it should have been and noticed it fading fast while we looked at the ripples in Tomales Bay.