Has anyone else noticed problems with wines corked under DIAM? Not flaws, but underwhelming delivery from wines that should be special. I ask because I am an annual buyer of Bourgogne Les Bons Batons from Patrice Rion. For more than 20 years, I have found this to be one of the best values in Burgundy – consistently outperforming its regional classification with its Chambolle-like finesse, brilliant red fruits and silky structure.
I recently opened my first bottle of this wine from 2012 – and was surprised to see it under DIAM. But as Patrice in the past has bottled this wine under screwcap, and is quite an experimenter, I made no assumptions. Then I tasted the wine: thin, flat, lacking in nose and substance, almost metallic; and this from an excellent vintage! Off bottle, I decided. Opened another, and got the same thing. So I contacted Patrice, and he admitted that he too has found the wine under DIAM underperforming. He has since stopped using the composite cork.
My question: Is this a one-off? Or are there wider-spread problems with DIAM corks dumbing down good wines? This is my first experience with a wine under DIAM.
Not familiar with the Rion wines, but Diam has various levels each with different oxygen transmission levels (all tend to be on the low side). The bottled wines need to have the sulfur matched to the ox transmission of the closure (and the ‘redox’ potential of the wine…this is true of any closure, of course). If the sulfur were high for the cork, it would ‘compress’ the wine as you describe. I’m sure there are others possible causes as well. I’ve had a number of wines using Diam, mostly chablis but also Clos Pepe PNs, Edmund St John wines and a few others and based on that I’d be surprised if there was something inherent in Diams (as opposed to something ‘situational’).
I encourage my producers to use Diam, and have had no negative experiences with the closure, either from TCA or oxidative problems. I doubt very much it was the closure.
On a visit to Burgundy last year, I heard a winemaker talk about her fears of using Diam for the glue flavors and aromas that come with the closures. I’d never thought about that before and have used Diam in some of my own wines and never noticed it. Plus drank many Melvilles and B-C’s, some aged for five years plus where the wines were in top shape. Anyone heard of this gluey scenario too?
We used Daim for at least a dozen years and have not noticed or received any comments about Diam affecting the wines taste profile. Occasionally some of our customers have told us that the Diam cork has been hard to remove from the bottle.
1 year and no problems. No corked bottles. No issues with how the wines show. Both Pinot and whites. Have also tasted older vintages of wines bottles under Diam that were perfectly fine. Not very worried.
Maybe they got a batch with extremely low-level TCA, below anyone’s recognition threshold but enough to mute the wine. I’ve been wondering if this could happen, but this is the first I’ve heard of any problems. It’s just a guess.
Not to be snarky, but just because it is guaranteed against something does not mean it can’t exiat, correct? I remember version 1 of DIAM had some TCA issues . . .
Also, if they guaranteed own to, say, 0.5 ppt, this still could affect a wine, correct?
Last count for me was 150 bottles under DIAM. Have not noticed any off tastes or odors yet. Not one single corked bottle either. My norm is 7/100. I would have expected 10 corked bottles. Could still be percentage error but gets less so with increasing numbers. Looking at my cellar, I see, maybe 200 more out of 750. So, will see.
They guarantee against it above a certain threshold. I believe it’s impossible to ensure that there really is zero. Their guaranteed standard, for whatever its worth (and who knows?), should eliminate any overtly “corky” aromas, but I suspect even extremely low levels could still impact the wine.
I’ve been using DIAM for five years and have never had a “corked” bottle. I have moved my red programs to NOMAcork as the wines are more expressive after bottling and as they mature. I still use DIAMs for chardonnay because the fruit is richer vs the NOMA. This I chalk up to the influence of cork flavors…unwooded whites get screw-caps typically but sometimes corks usually depending on logistical considerations.
Wineries have moved away from screw-caps because they’re not all their chalked up to be…including the KIWIs and Aussies. There are quite a few reasons including reductive issues, integrity of closure (its easy to bang the corner of screwcap and allow O2 in and often the screw-down machines don’t get it tight enough) and the fact that you’ve been able to control oxygen transfer rates with Diams and Noma’s for a lot longer and only recently with screw-caps. The jury is still out on the efficacy of OTR liners in screw-caps. Or, as Jim Laube constantly corrected me at a recent lunch, “twist-offs”.
DIAMs did have huge production issues when they were using the ROSA steam process originally and they corked a lot of wine and got sued. Thats when they went to the Diamante super-critical CO2 cleansing process (which is how you decaffeinate coffee as well).