John, Howard is not saying that sediment in Barolo adds to the sensory experience of drinking it if the sediment is stirred up enough to be present in the glass that you’re drinking. Hes saying that its presence enhances the aging process. I have no evidence either way but I suspect he is correct.
Yes, that is what I was trying to say. If I buy I bottle of 1947 Borogno Barolo Riserva, I don’t want the sediment to have been removed back in 2005. I want the sediment to remain in place as a natural part of the wine’s in-bottle development even though I will as part of my consumption ritual carefully separate that sediment from the wine when I drink it. I don’t know as a scientific fact that the presence of the sediment aids the aging process but intuitively I suspect it does.
Ok. I can see the argument.
Thank you, I did not know that. Burgundy sediment is also nastier than Cabernet sediment. I learned much too late in life to stand up older Burg bottles before drinking.
Seriously I wonder how someone like Francois Audouze feels about all this.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a “scam,” but an reconditioned bottle ought to be marked/labeled as such if the reconditioning involved removing/replacing the cork due to the risk of additional exposure to oxygen. And if any of the contents were altered–sediment removed, wine topped off, etc.–then that should also be indicated for basic disclosure purposes.
But of course there’s no industry standard at all in terms of how this is handled.
Bruce
It’s amazing that there are industry standards at all in wine as it is likely one of the most diverse types of product in the world. And it’s made up of ten of thousands of very small producers…
Are you claiming that they have unlabeled bottles in their cellars, only to slap a label on it years later? If so, then the vintage would be suspect and I would not trust such a practice with 10¢ of my money.
Re-corking is one thing, and a bottle should be so labeled. But to me that does not make it reconditioned. Altering the contents, that is another story entirely and I would not trust such an operation.
Undisclosed = scam.
If they are adding wine, removing sediment, slapping labels on unlabeled bottles, I doubt that they would disclose that as the value of the product would drop like a rock.
Recorking does not necessarily mean lots of air exposure, or that sediment is removed, etc. You recork because cork is such a stupid closure. Taking out the cork may allow some air exposure, but it’s not likely to be all that important.
However, if the bottle is emptied, or if other wine is poured into it, that’s a bit different. And if that’s “reconditioning” tnen you don’t know what you’re getting.
As I recall, it’s not unusual to keep unlabeled bottles in the cellar (especially in Burgundy) but they usually have some marking on them as to the year and vineyard. Occasionally producers will release small quantities of older wines that they pull and label for the market. These may get new labels and capsules, but the wine/closure is untouched.
Re-conditionning to me means recorking and topping up with wine of the same vintage or sometimes other wine (if laws don’t say a vintage wine must be 100% of that vintage). These wines are invariably inferior in my experience. Since Sauternes is so long lived, it happens there but I have almost never seen any offered for sale. Yquem used to claim that it recorked its private cellar bottles every 25 years, meaning that great wines like 1921 could have been opened and “topped up” two or three times.
Yuck, man. Serious yuck.
It’s pretty common for a winery to have unlabeled bottles in the cellar. They call them shiners in the US. They’re kept organized by vintage and a label is affixed when a batch is ready to be released. That’s SOP in some places and obviously has no effect on the wine in the bottle, though one needs to know the back story to discriminate between a fake and the real deal upon encountering a new label on an old bottle. It’s very different from recorking, topping up or trying to remove sediment to recondition the wine.
At the expense of stating the obvious, as a consumer I have no way of assessing the extent to which the wine in the bottle may have been exposed to air even if just the cork was replaced. At the very least, it is a factor I would weigh in deciding whether to buy a bottle and what price I would be comfortable paying. However, if there’s no disclosure that the bottle has been recorked/reconditioned, I may not know that until I pull off the capsule and remove what now appears to be a completely pristine cork…
Bruce
This thread (at least the topic) is a very interesting one. The problem is that there are such vague criteria/definitions for all of this. (And, I sense that “all of this” is buying older bottles from an estate).
The treatment can run a whole range of “improvements” to as little as putting a label on an unlabeled bottle (which is doing nothing to change the bottle; and storing older wines at domaines in France without labels is the norm; the labels otherwise would just disintegrate). Changing the cork; cleaning the wine; topping it off to allow it to age further…are all variables. At what point are these significant? Depends, I guess on one’s own criteria and the intent of the winery.(Topping off could be seen as a positive if it enables the wine to continue to age and adds a small amount of liguid.)
Then, there’s the separate issue of why wines from certain estates seem way younger on release than they should. Maison Leroy was built on that model (and I have little experience with Leroy). But, I do have a great deal of experience with the Domaine Robert and Michel Ampeau in Meursault. They kept their bottles to release when “mature” (whatever that means). Store in their freezing cellars, etc…they would seem as if they never aged a bit…and technically, they maybe hadn’t. (Similar is Bern’s cellar; they preserve the wines more than allow them to age…IMO…which can make for some robust wines that wouldn’t otherwise be as robust). I store my wines at 60+ degrees…sometimes warmer, as I want them to evolve, not be preserved.
I think to answer the question on this thread…is impossible. You need lots of facts you can’t get. And, then you have to figure out what your own criteria are for “scam” or “normal practice”. I doubt too many of these situations are really “scams” as I define the term.
How would the 1947 Casa de Sonoma fit into all of this? Reconditioned, or no?
Interesting issue with the Mont-Redon. I’ve had the 1978 labeled Domaine de Mont-Redon as well as the Chateau Mont-Redon. The former was far superior. The 1961 was Domaine de Mont-Redon was far superior to both. There is an informative post which addresses their reconditioning program, which is described as cork maintenance, and also the aggressive filtration processes in use in 1978, about a third of the way down on this page:
The post contains a link to a page showing the original 1978 label, as well as the ullage on an original bottling.
Clearly, the Chateau Mont-Redon label is a giveaway that this was reconditioned (whatever that means) but I wonder if there is something else at play here. I vaguely recall reading that Mont-Redon was among the CdP producers that used to bottle wines as demand required, keeping the remaining wine in tanks for later bottling, which caused variations between bottlings of the same vintage.
RE: the last part…bottling on demand was very big in the Southern Rhone…and even in the Norther Rhone through at least the '70s. So, their concept of what a “bottle of x vintage” even was was pretty vague. I once had a long talk with a well-known figure in CNP about it (unfortunately for me, largely in French)…and certainly, there was no intent to scam anyone. It was purely for the needs of the winery.
Jaboulet bottled at different times in the same vintage…and in Chablis, several places do. They don’t make just one assemblage.
Until recent years, consumers weren’t really obssessed with vintages. There was lots of “non vintage” wine made. Chapoutier used to make lots of that through the '80s…and maybe much later.
The obsession is with aged wine. The wine makers have realized this and this is why reconditioning is even an issue.