To be honest, with the exception of Mount Eden I don’t tend to hold Chardonnays long enough for premox to set in. I am sure there are people who do; is it as prevalent as in Burgundy?
I think the difference is that most folks don’t have expectations that domestic chardonnays should age as well as Burgundy. I don’t think it means that they cannot . . .
Curious to hear what others have to say . . .
Premox is quite different than normal oxidation or aging of white wine. The expression is different (dried straw on the finish is the biggest tell) and the differing expression of the bottles from the same case are two of the best ways to ID the problem. I have not seen these two issues in CA Chardonnay or whites from regions other than France.
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Complicated issue. What expectations do people have for aging any Chardonnay?
Burgundy is much warmer than it used to be, so expecting current wines to age the way the wines in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s did is a bit crazy. They’ve had 5 vintages in 20 harvests this century where picking began in August. After averaging 1 per century for 6 centuries.
We pick in August in Oregon and no one is going to suggest aging the wines for 20+ years. Why is it supposed to be different in Burgundy?
That said, I think most high quality Willamette Valley Chardonnays will age 5-10 years easily. Most of mine will evolve and gain from cellaring that long, but if you like acidity there’s no reason you need to wait.
I respect you a lot, but when I open a tired bottle of 1er Cru Puligny-Montrachet from a great producer that is less than 6-8 years old and was $70-150, I don’t care if it is pre-mox or just regular oxidation. Freshness and tension is a requirement for great white wine.
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I don’t care, either. But, I do think premox and regular ox seem to be different. Both suck, of course. But, they may have different solutions.
-Al
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I had a number of 95/96 kistler that were premox back in the mid to late 2000s. Bought a bunch and it was a grab bag of nutty butterscotch errors.
Hi Kevin,
Massive problem in Australia is the 90’s, early 00’s for Chardonnay, Riesling and Semillon. On mass, the industry switched to screwcap around 2002-2004. Zero problems now.
Cheers
Jeremy
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Could you people explain to me how on earth premox (what’s pre-mox? Premature moxidation?) is different from normal oxidation from a chemical point of view? What happens in both instances is that compounds that can oxidize, oxidize (color turns dark) and alcohol oxidizes to acetaldehyde (the wine develops that pungent, nutty, sherried nose of oxidation that can - depending on the wine - smell also like straw or stale bread).
This is the first time I’ve heard that it’s different from normal oxidation and - to be honest - it really doesn’t make sense. Oxidation is oxidation.
The only way in how it differs is that when a wine oxidizes, virtually all the wines develop in the same way - if all wines from a vintage 15 years ago are all oxidized, the wine just wasn’t built to last that long. However, if, say, 7 wines aged in similar conditions are completely shot and 5 eines are still beautiful, fresh and youthful, showing only some development, those 7 wines were premoxed and the wine definitely built to age.
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Is that premox or, as Marcus suggests, just normal oxidation for a wine that was kept too long.
A lot of Kistler from that era aged very well. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about variability.
I had a late-90s Marcassin in 2013 or 2014 that was phenomenal and showed zero hints of oxidation, premature or otherwise. In fact, if I had been forced to guess its age I’d have probably said '07/'08.
I have some Auberts that are nearly 20 years old. I’ll need to try them and see how they’ve held up.
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Yep, I saw that as well with Kistler. These were all well stored wines but they just turned into dark gold butterscotch mushroom bombs.
I’ve also seen a lot of it of late with Peter Michael Chardonnays that I’ve had from some friends’ cellars. On Saturday one of them opened a 2008 PM and it was clearly pre-mox’ed. I didn’t say a word as he thought it was fine. ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
Pre-mox and aged Chardonnay are two completely different animals.
Pre-mox wines are mid-to-dark butterscotch color and have the unmistakable nose of mushrooms. Yuck! And these are wines that tend to be 8-12 years old, which is definitely not too old for a well-made Chardonnay.
Aged Chardonnays have a completely different nose and flavor palate. They’re really magical, IMHO. I’ve had white Burgs from the 1970s that are amazing.
In a brown-bag group of mine, I used to figure that most – maybe 90% – of California chardonnays were noticeably oxidized and past it after five to seven years, certainly by ten years. And these were typically higher-end wines.
We’ve had fewer old chardonnays in recent years, so I don’t know if that rule of thumb still holds true.
There were exceptions like Chalone and Ridge. (I have virtually no experience with mature Mount Eden or Stony Hill, sadly.) But the great majority of California chardonnay were constructed differently from white Burgundy.
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This is a vague impression, but I think the oxidized California chardonnays I’ve had typically have somewhat less acetaldehyde than premox Burgundy.
Or it may just be that my expectations of longevity are different so I’m not so irritated by oxidation in them.
Now that Ramey is under DIAM, I am willing to take a bit more risk. Perhaps I will lay down a few Hyde Vineyard bottles for experimenting.
premox supposedly started in white Burgundy with the late 90s vintages though, so not about temperature. More recently, do we seriously think that e.g. 2015 white burgundy won’t age? It seems from Cellartracker at least that many 2003 white burgundies are still going strong.
It seems like the difference between white burgundy and U.S. chardonnays is about more than just temperature…
Diam and the like do seem to have helped reduce premox. As I’ve said several+ times before, Fevre had a terrible premox problem with their 2000-2009 vintages. They made other changes, but switching to Diam was the one that seemed to make the final difference.
I think pH also makes a big difference, the lower the better wrt premox. The soil and vintage weather seem to have the majority effect on pH, and little from anything done in the winery.
One thing I’ve always wonder whether it contributes…new barrels transmit a lot more oxygen to the wine it holds than old/neutral barrels do, which seem to transmit very little. It evens out when the wine is bottled, but I wonder if the new bbls are more of a problem when the pH is higher.
I’ve had 15+ year old Mt Eden Chardonnays several times, and all but one have been brilliant (the one was still good). Similar experiences with Stony Hill. I had a 79 Kistler Chardonnay, quite a while ago…it was still quite old at the time tho. It appeared completely dead/oxidized when opened. I tried it about an hour later and it had magically transformed into a beautiful aged chardonnay. Another hour later it was dead again. Don’t know how that happened!
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Let me ask a simple question:
At what age would you consider white burgundy to be premoxed?
Then another simple question:
At what age would you consider domestic shardeny to be over the hill?
As I said above, I think a big issue here is expectations of one region vs. another. In my mind, there is no reason that good domestic chardonnays cannot age gracefully for a very very long time period. That does not mean that we’ve seen this play out, but for those of you who are surprised that a domestic chardonnay tastes great after a decade or 2, should you be?