Bottle breakage:
A few months ago in the “cellar” my one bottle of 2010 Jadot Amoureuses. It seriously smelled terrific and complex on the concrete. The benefit of decanting with maximum surface area exposure. Because of that smell and because of self-beratement I replaced it at 50 percent higher cost, an irrational emotional decision.
Biggest loss that was my fault:
years ago drinking dozens and dozens of great (well, Parker said so, and in most cases he was right) wines in their primary stage 15 or 20 years before their first young peak, thinking only Bordeaux needs to age. Might as well have had them fall onto the highway, I now see that I learned and experienced nothing of the true wine, at best I learned to discern the hallmarks of eventual quality in a young wine. Maybe. I would love to have them now.
Its a work in progress. Honestly I have not been 100% happy with the results yet and I sat out this last harvest. A big epiphany for me is that I am really enjoying making wine from the Primitivo “Zinfandel” clone. It generally has more exuberant fruit, spices and much more intense aromatics than Zinfandel itself but still has the Zinfandel core. It really does well in the foothills. Also it generally has looser clusters so just from a practical perspective there is alot less rot than with Zin. My current plan for next harvest is to focus on just Primitivo. I worry that it will be hard to market compared to Zinfandel itself but Im excited enough to give it a shot.
18L of 08 Pontet Canet and a whole case of 05 Mouton about a week apart… at least one btl of that 05 mouton was heavily corked though…
Broke a bottle of 05 Malescot in a way that sabered it a couple months ago so I got to drink 3/4 of it… at 8 AM lol… damn fine ultra ripe extracted Margaux with a long life ahead.
One of my friends that helps out with bottling slipped and stepped on a valve on a tank of chardonnay we were about to bottle. The valve came off. Finished wine was coming out of a 1.5 inch port until I got my hand on it. Then we had to put a cap with gasket on. It took a couple of tries. We were drenched. I lost about 11 cases.
Could you not label the primitivo as zin and explain on the label that it’s the primitivo clone? They aren’t considered different varieties for labeling purposes, are they?
Berry, if unable to label that as Zin (unfamiliar with those specific TTB regs), why not reverse osmosis and blend with some bone dry neutral wine to label as a red blend for financial purposes after bottling a limited number of ‘primitivio’?
You’re right to shy away from primitivo in this market though… toxic from a sales perspective… one way to mitigate would be an uber expensive concentrated super cuvée with a millenial friendly bottling/labeling… the market is lacking one of those. That would require pos work though…
Unless things have changed over the last year or two the TTB does not allow Primitivo to be labeled as Zinfandel despite them being DNA identical.
I strongly suspect people are breaking the rules though. I know of a winery that harvests primitivo from the same vineyard that I do and only offers a Zinfandel. Hmm… Also I’ll try some Zinfandels sometimes that, at least to me, have very strong Primitivo characteristics. To me it is very distinctive.
1900 Chateau MARGAUX which was worth a certain number of cases of wine.
When it fell, the perfume was the greatest perfume of wine that I had ever smelled.
I sucked the ground to try to drink what I could.
When I realised the catastrophe, I decided to compensate and I opened a 1919 Ausone which is probably the best Ausone in my life, probably because of the emotion too.
So sad François, waiting for +100 years, and it breaks… And My sharp eye can see it was a Danish bottling from Copenhagen.
Good with the 1919 shining, as a little compensation.
I am lucky only to have made a stain, looking like Afrika, on My cellar carpet. It was a 1999 La Lagune. Could have been so much worse. -“7-9-13” must be said fast (superstition), so the luck doesn’t change.
In my situation it was two bottles of 96 salon. But by my standards that is a tragedy. I’ll probably never taste that wine at this point. Still Im most sad about the Swans.
Terrible to lose old Swans and everything else, too: sorry.
Somehow my wife broke a bottle of 1955 Cheval Blanc. I wasn’t home.
Fifteen years ago I went to meet some friends at the beach in NC and a bottle of 1985 Pichon Baron dropped out of my bag and broke on the pavement. Had other nice bottles with me, though, including a 1983 JJ Prum Weh Son Auslese that was very nice.
Twenty years ago I was walking into Trump Hotel on Columbus Circle and dropped a bottle of Single Malt on the lobby floor. Smash.
