- Dujac - recent wines have been overly stemmy/unbalanced at the grand cru level, best wines are village level.
- Angerville - overpriced and underwhelming of late.
- PYCM - quality has decreased since 2017 or so.
- Ramonet whites - less tension of late.
- Henri Boillot - premox
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But you didn’t address the ‘And Why’ part to address the question of the OP…?
Yeah was going to elaborate when I had time, updated:
Roulot — price and not sure about reliability of recent vintages.
Schrader — sale made me think of how often I have occasion to drink these. New corporate castle tasting “experience” pissed me off, on photos alone.
PYCM — ditto Roulot reasons
Jadot — nothing wrong, just have a lot of it.
Coche-Dury — simply a price issue.
What strikes me here is how much of this list is not a quality issue, just an excessive popularity issue.
John, what have been some of your favorite Jadot’s?
Agreed. Pricing has been attractive the last four or so years.
Interesting differences in opinion here. I’ve started buying more Dujac and PYCM lately because I think the wines are better than they’ve ever been. I love the really balanced stemmy notes in the most recent vintages.
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I’ve found Dujac to be marginally better in 19+, but for me because there’s been less obvious whole cluster.
PYCM is much less reductive than it used to be which I strongly dislike. Of note, so is Coche.
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Making an old guy think sometimes causes headaches.
1 : Williams-Selyem - this was my very first mailing list wine. Enjoyed the wines, liked pick-up days at the old barn. Once they built the new winery the prices just pushed through the stratosphere for me and the QPR just didn’t add up. It became more of a “Look at me” purchase.
2: Copain - Loved the wines, loved Wells, bought some bottles ( a bunch of large formats and a handful of 750s) from Wells after the JFW purchase when he was winding down as winemaker. One of the 750s was corked so I dropped by the tasting room one day on my way home from work. Tasting room manager said they didn’t have that particular one on hand but he’d get back to me. Emailed me a couple days later saying he looked at my purchase history and I did not buy the bottle from them so they were not going to replace it .I said, “You produced it right? You put a bad cork in it right?” I have had producers reach out to me (Lagier-Meredith, Sandlands, Jeff Cohn to name a few) when I’ve posted a CT note about a wine being corked and offered replacements. Even in bottles I purchased on the secondary market. He basically told me to pound sand. So I did. Haven’t bought a bottle since. Been 10yrs now. This is the first time I’ve outed them.
3: Seghesio - I’m not sure why. Their Sonoma County Zin was our house wine for years. Maybe it was Bedrock who knocked them off their perch. Hard to say.
4: Arnot-Roberts - kinda like Williams-Selyem. Loved the wines, Duncan is a great guy, they were local here in Forestville but were in a different league financially than I could honestly afford on a regular basis. I’ll still bite like I did 2 years ago but.
5: Switchback Ridge - two words, Palate Shift. Used to love the PS but big behemoth wines are few and far between in my cellar these days.
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This may be a dumb question but consider the source. Could you de-stem, press off the juice then add stems back in during fermentation or does that produce a different profile? Thinking about it now I guess that negates skin contact and color extraction, so like I said it’s a dumb question.
Dehlinger- still love the wines but I still have several cases and just not drinking as much pinot as I used to which is mostly what I bought from them
Schrader - price and ownership change combined to no mas
scarecrow - price
fingers crossed - ended up with a few cases and found I wasnt drinking as much of that style anymore. With that said had a 2019 white last night and it was awesome
red cap - liked supporting Tom but once he sold the label I no longer had the same connection
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Good points. When a winemaker owned winery changes hands and becomes a corporate ownership thing, I tend to bow out.
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Re Dujac, yes perhaps less overtly stemmy since 19, though I winder if that is as much down to the ripeness of the stems as anything else (perhaps apart from in 21, where I believe they used less).
Re PYCM, yes they’re definitely less reductive, as are Coche-Dury and for that matter Benoit Ente and to some degree also Lafon (judging by a tasting on Friday), etc. As such, that’s very much the trend across the board I feel. Not sure how much of it is driven by stylistic changes and how much is other factors. I suspect it’s a bit of both. I do like the 23 PYCM a lot though, despite not being as reductive as in the past (I loved a super-reductive 17 the other day). I do think they may end up being excellent, even better wines when I come around to drinking them in 10-15 years or so.
Brian, you may have just given birth to a new stylistic movement…
My gut reaction is that this would be impractical for reds as the fermentation on skins takes many days. What do you do with the stems in the meantime? Then, there’s separating them from the liquid at some point.
Overall, I think it would bring mostly undesirable flavors, in my view. Maybe someone will do this as an experiment with extra grapes…
F
Or, hopefully, maybe not! 
I’m reasonably sure I’ve heard of people destemming, then tossing in some stems during fermentation. How do producers achieve “50% whole cluster”? Do they ferment all the whole cluster together, and all the destemmed separately? Or do they destem the percentage, and combine them in one tank?
This is what David Lett used to do at Eyrie.
I’ve seen it two ways, both with their aficionados: 1. Dump the 50% (or whatever proportion they choose) whole fruit in tank and destem the rest on top. 2. Destem first and dump whole fruit on top.
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I stopped buying Seghesio too. Needed to choose between Ridge and Seghesio.
Saxum, pricing was reaching the stupid point and I found an alternative as good with better price points
West of Temperance. A BD find that no longer exists
Carlisle, too many Zins, too many other options
Nicora, see Saxum
Ojai, I buy his older stuff on Winebid, but the newer vintages just aren’t the same
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