Was there ever any problem with his wines? He is something of an expert on oxidation in chardonnay, going back to his days with Zelma Long, and has strong opinions about premox in Burgundy.
Not that I am aware of. I just think his wines are good ones to age if I have a mind to (I normally do not age Chard to any degree).
One difference is the randomness in Burgundy. With California chardonnay, it seemed pretty consistent after five to ten years, with a few consistent exceptions.
#DIAM Problem nearly 100% solved.
This.
If a producer known to make wines that age for +30 years makes a wine in a given vintage that is completely dead at 10 years of age, all bottles without exception, that is not premox; that is just an early-drinking vintage and an aberration in the producer’s style.
However, if a noticeable portion of the wines are going as strong as expected and another noticeable portion is turning up oxidized, that’s premox.
If almost all wines are performing as expected but a few oxidized bottles pop up here and there, I wouldn’t call them premoxed, just off bottles due to fault in closure etc.
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Another way of putting it is that a lot of California chardonnay oxidizes fairly consistently even with good closures.
Something I don’t know: Do they age longer under screwcap or Diam? It wouldn’t surprise me if Dave Ramey knows the answer.
To Otto’s earlier point, and I could be completely wrong, but isn’t it so that a majority of the “fancier” Burgundy white producers do aging in barrels, whether new or neutral? A wine that’s made in a very reductive way (which is almost impossible to do in a barrel), would obviously have much further to go before contact with oxygen spoils it.
I don’t claim to know much of anything about premox from my own sensory experience, since I largely cannot afford white burgundy, don’t prioritize it when I splurge, and historically haven’t drunk much.
What I can say is that my experience with California Chardonnay has led me to no longer seek out or take any interest in bottles that are more than 5 years old, with a few exceptions. Whatever you want to call it, I’ve found that a lot of these wines are oxidized and that even those that aren’t obviously flawed start to get pretty tired. I’m more nervous about the Russian River Valley than about the better vineyards in Carneros (like David, I’m sitting on some Hyde from Ramey as well as HdV), and have had some very positive experiences with aged Chardonnays from the true Sonoma coast (Peay, Hirsch, Flowers), though I did have a really nastily oxidized 2008 Flowers last year.
He did an interview somewhere recently where he spoke to that. Maybe the Winemakers Podcast. It may have been on an IG live interview.
Yes, virtually 100%.
A wine that’s made in a very reductive way (which is almost impossible to do in a barrel), would obviously have much further to go before contact with oxygen spoils it.
Uh, well, no. It might sound counterintuitive, but actually the more reductively a wine is made, the more susceptible it is to oxidation. If a wine is protected from oxygen from the crush all the way to the bottling, it is in all likelihood going to be a fruity wine suited for early drinking. That’s why many early-drinking Pinot Grigios and Sauvignon Blancs get flat only in a couple of years.
If oxygen is introduced during the aging process in a slow, controlled manner, the more oxygen a wine gets at this point, the more protected it is going to be against oxidation after it is bottled. For example, in must hyperoxidation (a process traditionally in use at least in Burgundy with Chardonnay and in Germany with Riesling), the freshly obtained must is left to oxidize before fermentation so that the must turns yellow to dark brown as all the compounds that are very prone to oxidation, oxidize. Then they drop out of the solution and the end result is clear must from which the easily oxidized compounds are oxidized and removed. Wines made with this method are much better protected against oxidation than wines made in stainless steel tanks in the absence of oxygen, as they don’t contain those rapidly oxidizing compounds. They might lose some obvious primary fruit qualities in the process, but if the wine is supposed to last 10 years and longer, that really doesn’t matter, now does it?
Furthermore, lees bind oxygen, so it is far from impossible to make wines reductively in a barrel. All you have to do is to have more lees in the barrel than what the oxygen ingress through the oak is. The newer the barrel, the larger the oxygen ingress and the more lees are required to keep the environment reductive. However, some oxygen always gets through, but this is only good for the wine - slow, controlled oxidation during élevage is not going to oxidize the wine, just protect it against further oxidation further down the line.
This is also the reason how old school Nebbiolos are so damn ageworthy. Aging the wines in large botti casks for 3-5 years doesn’t really oxidize the wines, it only helps them to not oxidize. However, you really can’t do the same trick with new barriques - there the oxygen ingress is going to be too fast and there’s going to be too much for it: a good wine that can handle the oxygen can be aged for like 18-24 months, but three years is pushing it and 5 years in a new barrique will most likely result in rather obvious oxidative qualities.
But you’re a winemaker, you know all this, right?
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Perhaps, and perhaps not.
U.S. Chardonnays are not something I can address, as WA, OR, and CA Chardonnays are very, very different.
For the 90s in white Burgundy we saw pre-mox originating. But global didn’t just begin on January 1, 2000. Early examples of pre-mox may well have been the canary in the coal mine. Producers where the site or the process left the wines open to earlier oxidation because of a lack of recognition of the less obvious impacts of global warming that most assuredly were beginning to occur.
There’s a lot more than temperature involved in the longevity of any wine, white or red. Dissolved CO2, sulfur additions, pH, closure, and reductive process(the resuctive wines can become oxidized without losing the reductive aspects).
Regarding current vintages aging, that’s probably site by site, and producer by producer now. In the previous centuries, Burgundy’s acerage pH was probably more uniformly low because the fruit barely was ripe(finished abvs at 12-13.0% for most non-GC white Burgundy and pHs down around 3.0). Modern viticulture has changed a lot of that. 2015 white Burgundy carries a lot of heft, but acids were good. Will they age for 20 years? Maybe.
And are current white Burgundy wines different from Oregon for aging? I don’t know, but 10 years is not a problem for many Willamette Valley wines. I’d assume the same for Burgundy. But I’ve had some disappointing experiences with white Burgundy in the 7-8 year old range overthe past couple of years. Enough that I look to open those wines in the first 5 years these days. And to be fair, they usually taste great then.
Otto, you are close but not quite on target.
Preventing the fruit and juice from ever seeing oxygen, especially pre-fermentation does lead to fruity wines with shorter shelf lives. That’s not quite the same as reductive, where the process is actively moving away from oxidative(this happens primarily in fermentation and during malolactic). If you move the wine significantly in a reductive manner you’ll get a range of compounds, some that can be addressed by the introduction of oxygen and some less so. If these compounds don’t see some oxygen they can bind together and become more complex, and stable compounds that will remain in the wine and are not fruity at all(e.g. many Cameron Pinot Noirs)
We introduce a ton of oxygen during the prefermentation. Juice is dark brown going into barrel. This allows easily oxidized compounds to bind up and drop from the juice. The fermention is a reductive process and refreshes the wine completely, and can even add some durable reduxtive compounds that are non-fruit in their organoleptic presentation(taste and smell). The wine then sits on the lees for a controlled oxidative period ahead malolactic conversion. Malo is reductive again, and then the wines are on lees in a controled oxidative state again until bottling. That said, we utilize larger casks to keep the process oxidative but at a minimal level. Meanwhile the autolysis of the lees adds textural elements that also hold onto some reductive compounds.
It’s kind of a see-saw back and forth between oxidation and reduction for our wines. But they are in barrel for 20 months and I am unaware of the wines being considered oxidized at any reasonable age. 2011 is the closest to over the hill and I would put that on the amount malic acid present in the vintage(weaker pH).
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That would seem obvious, but maybe it isn’t always true. I remember reading that Clark Smith found higher measured redox potential with more exposure to air during elevage in certain wines, rather than the other way around. I don’t remember the details. I’ll try to find them at some point.
Many wines, including whites, are handled or aged somewhat oxidatively and can age for a very long time. Historically, a lot of wines that were definitely not made in a modern, reductive style, aged well for several decades. I know this isn’t the type of direct comparison I mentioned above, but it does raise some questions about the assumption that reductive handling = longer aging potential.
edit: I hadn’t seen Marcus’ more detailed and informed post yet when I posted this.
I still have a distinction in my mind between “chardonnay that has become oxidized” and “chardonnay that is too old and past its prime.”
Let’s say you bottled some grocery store $20 chardonnay like Sonoma Cutrer under a screwcap and put it in the cellar for 15 years. I don’t think it would have become oxidized under the screwcap, but it probably would be long past its prime. Fruit faded away, acids faded away, probably kind of flat and lifeless. Probably if you did that with a case of the wine, the case would all be similar at that age.
If I’m correct in making that distinction, then “how long a wine should age well and still be a good drinking experience” and “how long until the wine oxidizes” should not be the same thing.
I think there are some ageworthy California chardonnays, and if the makers of those switched to DIAM or screwcaps, we’d get to experience and enjoy how they are in their later maturity. As it is, we sometimes get to experience that, and other times experience premox, and the premox risk makes us reluctant to roll the dice holding the bottles that long.
You are spot on. Our process of hyper-oxidizing the juice is pretty common, but I picked it up from reading about Rhone producers utilizing the texhnique to make their Grenache rosé wines more shelf stable and to stay fresh longer.
Actually, the lees aging really doesn’t “hold onto some reductive compounds” but instead actually consumes dissolved oxygen (as dissolved oxygen oxidizes the lipids in the yeast cell walls), which in turn make the wine a more reductive environment, which might introduce some reductive compounds.
I do agree that it definitely is a see-saw and I’ve heard many times that it’s a tricky game to keep the wine as reductive as possible with the lees so you can maximize the oxidative aging in barrels without getting too reductive, which might be a trickier thing to rectify.
I’ve known many natural wine producers try to maximize lees aging in order to stabilize the wine and protect it against oxidation by keeping it in barrels for as long as possible - for example this process might explain how Ganevat’s natural white wines (tahat are systematically aged for 36 months in oak) are so ridiculously long-lived despite getting no SO2 additions. I looked up one paper that discusses this subject:
When wines are stored in standard barrels of 225 L, the amount of oxygen they receive varies between 10 and 45 mg/L per year with an average of 20 mg/L per year, decreasing with the age of the barrels (31, 32). Assuming an average oxygen uptake of 0.05 mg/L per day in the barrel, a yeast OCR of 0.002 mg/(L·h) would be required to remove that oxygen at the rate it dissolves in the wine if yeast cells were the only oxygen receptor. However, a simultaneous and variable chemical binding of oxygen is unavoidable. It increases with increasing concentrations of free SO2 and lowers the reductive effect exerted by yeast lees. As a practical consequence, traditional white wine ageing under semi-oxidative conditions in barrels is carried out with low concentrations of free SO2 and high amounts of yeast lees periodically resuspended by stirring. The redox behaviour during traditional barrel ageing does not apply to fruity white wines usually stored in tanks with higher concentrations of free SO2.
What I didn’t know previously was that even a small addition of SO2 effectively negates lees’ capability to bind oxygen:
It has been shown for the first time that sulfur dioxide strongly inhibits the reactions involved in oxygen consumption by yeast lees, with levels of more than 20 mg/L of free SO2 at wine pH making it almost meaningless. Thus, the antioxidant effects of both yeast lees and sulfur dioxide cannot be used in a complementary way. In wines stored with relatively high concentrations of free SO2, the protection against oxidation by yeast lees is less beneficial than in wines with low sulfite concentrations. Since the antioxidant effect of yeast lees is most expressed when free SO2 is low or absent, they are a valuable winemaking tool when wines without the added SO2 are to be produced.
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Marcus, Otto:
Hyper-oxidizing juice seems to be pretty common and best practice today, and a lot of producers are no longer afraid of air before fermentation is complete on whites. But it’s what happens after that, during elevage, where I suppose it gets a little more up for interpretation. I’ve always done my whites on the lees until bottling, but not stirred them, mainly because it eliminates extra work for me… ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
This has been my experience as well. Kistlers of the 90’s were made to drink the day you bought them. They were the epitome of the overworked big bomb Chardonnays that RMP loved back in the day. They would pretty regularly self destruct at about 5 years of age and eventually I just quit buying them. Dipped my toe in the deep end of the pool again with Aubert, haven’t had enough aged ones to see if they will follow the same abbreviated aging curve. Really enjoy some of the Jura Chardonnays now, they come pre-oxidized appear to hold better.
Is that what happened to the montelena chard? Hyperoxygenation?
I’ve come to believe that longer time on the lees without stirring yields finer results than batonnage does. Stirring seems to build texture it’s coarser(IMO) than wines with 18-20 months on lees but no real amount of stirring. We occasionally stir a time or two at the end of primary to get the wines fully dry, but that’s about it.
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