Surrounded by murgers on three sides with cliff to the rear… if you look more closely at the photos you will see the murgers.
Glad I found this thread after buying two bottles of the 2017 vintage of this wine. Made me feel good about my decision and i’m looking forward to trying the wine.
Love the pictures of the vineyard.
I’m curious about how they control DO in the finished wine. Is this done through sulfur additions or is the wine somehow held in an anaerobic environment?
The main opportunity for a wine to pick up oxygen is when it’s moved from one vessel to another, e.g. racked to tank for bottling, or actually bottled. So if you displace oxygen with nitrogen or an inert gas in the bottling tank, and rack the wine carefully using a peristaltic pump, you can minimize oxygen update. And then if you use nitrogen sparging at bottling you further reduce dissolved oxygen.
Historically, bottling was done direct from the barrel. And I think there was an awkward period when bottling lines (often mobile bottling lines) came in and wines were suddenly being pumped for sometimes quite long distances and filtered for the sake of the machines, which must have resulted in some pretty fatigued wines - especially the beginning and end of each bottling run.
Since Niellon has been pretty affected over the years by premox (obviously not alone in that!), and I assume has not switched to DIAM, I was wondering what experience anyone has had more recently with the Niellon 2014’s…realizing that they are only 5 years out, and if fated to premox, may not have done so yet. But if anyone has cracked some recently, just wondering if they are crisp and pristine, seeming to be more advanced than expected, premoxed, etc.