I’m surprised, as I’ve found the 2000s to be far more problematic than the 1990s with respect to oxidation at Domaine Leflaive.
I also don’t think that reconditioning 90% of the older bottles in any way suggests that 90% were defective. I think it just means that they opened 90% of the old stock and then topped off when necessary and recorked the good ones and, I assume, discarded the bad ones. It would be fascinating to find out the percentages by vintage of oxidized and corked bottles that they encountered, though I’d be surprised if they shared that information.
I still think you are misinterpreting this. I believe it means something like this:
They made a decision to recondition all bottles of Grand Cru and Pucelles (and maybe some other Premier Crus). Those made up 90% of what they had in the cellar. The other wines (Puligny Villages, Macon Verzé, etc.) they did not decide to recondition. It’s possible that they don’t intend to sell those 10%, don’t consider them ageworthy enough, or just don’t feel that the value/cost of the wine justifies reconditioning.
Of the 90%, some portion would turn out to be bad. The good ones would be topped up and recorked. The 90/10 split is not about which individual bottles need reconditioning. It’s a business decision that they want a certain class of wines to be sold as reconditioned and not oxidized or corked. Of course this would not be done at all if there wasn’t a serious problem, but you can’t infer any particular number from it.
Here is what Steve Tanzer says in his Sept 2019 Vinous article in the Chevalier Montrachet vertical:
“Morandière informed us that all of the bottles we’d be tasting had been opened, tasted and recorked in recent years. Indeed, one of Morandière’s first decisions after taking over direction of Domaine Leflaive was to carry out this procedure for all pre-2014 Grand Crus and Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles remaining in the estate’s cellars—23,000 bottles were “reconditioned” over a period of three years. Morandière made it clear that this process was not undertaken to “refresh” older bottles: “Our main objective was to get rid of the traditional corks and replace them with DIAM closures, which we feel more confident about.”
I was at that tasting, and that is not what I remember Brice de La Morandière saying. Of course, I could be misremembering; or Steve and Brice might have exchanged subsequent to the tasting and that may be the source of the quotation. But while the new regime at Leflaive obviously do favor DIAMs for new releases, my understanding was that not all of the reconditioned bottles had been recorked with DIAMs, and certainly some of those opened for the tasting were under natural cork.
I also do not recollect either Brice or Pierre Vincent claiming that this was a problem “mainly” experienced in the 1990s, as the RVF article states.
Great addition to this discussion Herwig. From my experience of clinical trials in cancer medicine my conclusions on this data are :
It’s a very useful sample with a 12.4% hit rate which is pretty consistent with anecdotal experience. A statistician could do a standard error on this data but it is limited by the variability of the incidence across makers.
Unfortunately sub-set analysis in a study of this size is unreliable because the subsets are small - the largest Boillot at 71 will still have a large error range but anecdotally the result seems low. Most are less than 25 bottles tasted and hence inherently unreliable in their frequency, explaining surprise results like the Roulot ( I’ve never had a premoxed bottle but could hit a run of them next week ). I used to say I’d never had a premoxed Ramonet ( n of probably 40 bottles ) until I struck 2 in December one of which was the 2010 Montrachet !
Your data and Don Cornwell’s data emphasise how limited the information is beyond our anecdotal outrage - if this was a cancer medicine, a BMW car, an aeroplane turbine or one of so many consumer goods there would have been a full analysis and a set of controlled trials of various interventions to guide us. i suspect it would not be hard to devise an optical through the glass technique for assessing white wine in a bottle but this is a small volume industry with widely dispersed consumers and only a small percentage of premium products and premium consumers where ageing beyond 5 years is important.
I do know I’ve never had a spoilt bottle of aged at least 10 years Australian Chardonnay or Riesling sealed with Stelvin screw-cap ( n of over 100 ) suggesting that closure matters even if its not the whole story.
I’m happy to design a statistically sound and definitive controlled trial in this space. They are however fiendishly expensive and slow to complete. On the other hand they do provide great opportunities for collaboration between international colleagues with an open mind, a thirst for the truth and a love of a truly great drink !
Thank you again Herwig for sharing your data !
On the Vinous boards, I believe the question was asked of Steve Tanzer after he published notes on the tasting, whether he knew how many of the bottles they found to be advanced during reconditioning, how many bottles were discarded, etc. if I remember his reply, he did not have that information and it was not discussed.
Isn’t this a long tradition with wineries. For many generations, in many years, wineries were selling wines that were underripe, made with rotten grapes, etc.
I think I may have been the one that asked that question on the Vinous boards, but there was no answer. This is a continuation of the baloney that we get from the producers–the Leflaive folks know EXACTLY how many bottles they had to discard, and they aren’t going to tell us. Perhaps William knows if they were more forthcoming at the tasting, but I would be fairly surprised if they actually put that information out there. Why would one ever buy that product? I Would be interested if anyone knows of important producers who have been totally upfront about their premox experiences (I know Fevre has been fairly honest about it, but others haven’t been coming to mind.)
I also asked about this after the report of the Dauvissat clos tasting that Tanzer did with Vincent, but I haven’t heard an answer, so I’m presuming Stephen didn’t get one there either. I’m not nearly so upset with Dauvissat as it seems in my experience to be a more recent phenomenon, but I would like some transparency there as well (and BTW, I’ve stopped buying those wines.)
As someone said above, this would be more useful with some sense of how old the bottles were when you drank them. Not sure how meaningful it is if a 4-5 year old wine is not premoxed.
With that said, these percentages seem lower than I would have expected based on all the yelling and screaming about premox I see on the web. Don’t know if that’s because the wines were young when you drank them though.
Boys , my analysis is not statistically meaningful . To start with , all vintages are mixed . So it’s entirely possible that our 9 bottles from Fevre came from later vintages and did not include 2005 and 2008 , 2 major culprits imho . I’m just pointing out to a trend . Which is pretty consistent with Don and others experience .
Regarding Domaine Leflaive : we had premox from 2007 ( 1 ) , 2008 ( 1 ) , 2004 ( 2 ) , 2002 ( 2 ) and 1999 ( 1 ) . But these are our wine club tasting notes . I also remember 2005 Chevalier AND 2005 Batard , both totally premoxed , at a dinner in Beaune . And another premoxed Chevalier 2010 recently . It’s all over the place .( I did not check tasting notes on older Leflaive’s )
Yep, that should be true. I saw the range 2002 to 2015, and since that covers a goodly portion of Fevre’s not so good years, I figured they might have had a bottle or two. My understanding is that the Fevre Grand Cru went Diam in 2010, the Premier Cru in 2007. Anyway, you are right, not a bad one so far that made use of Diam…
Yep, that’s pretty much it. Fèvre began testing their first samples of DIAM in 2003, continuing in 2004 and 2005. They changed all of their villages production to DIAM5 in 2006. They followed by bottling their 1er crus with DIAM in 2007 and the grand crus since 2010. That’s the domaine wines - not sure for contracts, I heard of people still seeing some corks in 2011, if so, perhaps that was them finishing off their ‘stocks’ of cork…
Petit Chablis & Villages Chablis use DIAM5
Premier Cru Chablis use DIAM5 except for Vauloret and Montée de Tonnerre which use DIAM10 (54mm long)
Heard nothing more on this Craig. The domaine were pretty unhappy with people connecting them to this ‘transaction’ and disowned themselves from it. Open conjecture at that time, given the volume of wine discussed, was that it could have come from a Leflaive shareholder rather than the domaine itself.
