Thank you Marcus for your superb range of stories, ideas, and personal learnings throughout this thread - I’ve found them fascinating and educational.
I wonder, to your point about significant tannin and phenolics being necessary for great wines, how that relates to Pinot Noir? I ask because my personal experience, albeit much more limited than your own, has been that Pinots with higher phenolic loads can feel over-built and muddy, and that some of the stylistically lighter Pinots I’ve had have been some of the most aromatically and structurally enchanting despite low tannin.
Definitely didn’t mean to come across so black and white. I certainly defer to your experience on the matter, but I think the impact of the unreliable narrator in the form of homo sapiens on the wine experience is often overlooked.
I don’t think I am totally following you. Why would the final change be more random than the prior change? If the bottles had all been “closed” the entire time prior to reaching the period of vacillation, I understand how it could be difference in getting to the next phase and related to cork differences. Where I lose that argument is the two periods before where all bottles tasted were “open” and then later “closed” again. It seems to me if it was differences in rate of change/cork variability and the randomness of which bottles were opened that there should have been less distinct differences in this time period. I do believe that I tasted enough bottles in each phase described that differences should have been noted and were not.
Very interesting read with my morning coffee (which is decidedly not shut down). The initial question was what causes wines to shut down, and 95% of the discussion has been about what is “shut down” and when and to which wines might it happen.
I wish I had answers on what causes it. I don’t. I only know that I have experienced it across a wide range of wines of varying ages, confirmed through opening additional bottles to ensure no other cork related flaw.
I think this makes a lot of sense but that we need to give more emphasis to the wine’s redox chemistry. Especially if we want to offer an account for why white wines shut down. To do this, we really need to factor in closure too, as different closures have different oxygen transmission profiles over time. But I think it’s clear that the higher a wine’s redox potential, i.e. the stronger its tendency to move in a reductive direction, the longer it will tend to shut down, all things being equal (which, thanks to closures, they seldom are!). So a low pH white with appreciable dry extract from the skins (flavenols and other antioxidants) will have a higher redox potential and tend to shut down harder and longer.
I informally tested the biodynamic calendar’s effect on wine tasting on dozens of days over the course of a few years and found absolutely no correlation between what kind of day it was and how wines were showing. My method was simple. I tasted regularly with a friend who owned a terrific shop focused on natural wine. After tasting whatever wines we were drinking, which often included wines we’d had before and which included wines from pretty much every region and ranging from new releases to wines with 25-30 years of age, I would tell him how I thought they were showing and he would then look up what kind of day it was.
After trying this with literally hundreds of wines, I found that wines were as likely to seem off (which really generally means that my palate seemed off) on fruit and flower days as on root and leaf days. Also, wines were no more likely to show well on fruit and flower days than on root and leaf days. These findings held true regardless of the age of the wines, variety, region, and viticultural and winemaking techniques. The only consistent correlation that we observed was that most wine tended to show less well when the humidity in the shop was high. While the effect was most pronounced with red wine, whites suffered as well with Chenin Blanc seeming to suffer the most for some reason.
Redox…what an elusive thing. I used to work on the chemistry of the Earth’s deep interior, where redox can often be understood in terms of simple systems that are more or less fully describable. Even there, I was often left scratching my head, as were many people much smarter than I am. Fully understanding the redox state of a much more complex solution like wine, and how that evolves with time, really is a holy grail topic and one I hope we see much progress on in the next couple of decades.
The temperature in the store ranged from mid-60s to low 70s, so not as cool as most wine caves but not that warm. It was most noticeable in the summer when an afternoon storm cranked up the already high humidity, but also in spring and fall when the temperature was low so the AC wasn’t running but the humidity was high. I haven’t noticed a similar issue at cellar temperatures so temperature seems to play a role.
Differences you note due to humidity are almost certainly reflective of your own palate variation that might follow hotter, cooler, drier, wetter, etc., conditions. Not the wine itself.
There appear to be different types of ‘shut down’. Leaving out some of the more esoteric variants, for me shut down has great association with cellaring wines where Nebbiolo is the grape / lead grape. That said what I describe below is less common than it used to be.
In youth the fruit is vibrant and can hold its own against the tannins. It still cries out for food though and a horizontal tasting can suck the moisture from your mouth.
The fruit loses that initial intensity and the tannins appear more to the fore, sometimes giving the feeling of a hard tannic shell and little else
With luck, the fruit holds up enough that when the tannins start to precipitate out, the wine opens up again, and not just that but the fruit has started transforming into more tertiary flavours and aromas, giving greater complexity and individuality.
Not all were that lucky, and who knows where current wines will be at 30, 40, 50+ years old?
Last week I opened a 2019 Chateau des Chaintres Saumur-Champigny and the nose was very muted with no fruit and a slight TCA funk going on. A lot of people would have dismissed it as a bad bottle. But from experience, I knew that it just needed some oxygen and I decanted it. 30 minutes later is was good to go and at 1 1/2 hours it was singing. I wonder how many people dismiss a bottle being bad or in a dumb phase and don’t decant it?
This is classic shut down wine. Must be the Marsanne. Every review of high end Hermitage Blanc I’ve ever read has talked about how good they are immediately on release. Then they “shut down” for many years and finally re-emerge as a different, very desirable beast. All wines evolve and maybe some of them lose their appeal at various points along that journey. Wines that don’t “shut down” retain their appeal as they evolve form primary to secondary to tertiary, while others do not. Maybe so.
While we’re off on a tangent, I have a related story of the effect of air temperature on perception of mature wines. An almost scientificky anecdote. At a summer (June) event at Ridge - Monte Bello they featured the trio of 95/97/99 Monte Bello, after a current release line-up, on what turned out to be the hottest day of the year. This must’ve been 10-12 years ago. They prep’d the bottles in the cellar and brought them up just in time, as it was so friggin’ hot out. The current release wines all tasted correct. The library trio all showed about 20 years more mature than they were.
I’ll note this was a 2 day event. People who tasted the Saturday, with more reasonable air temperature, all thought the wines tasted excellent and proper. People tasting Sunday, both with me and from different bottles over the course of the day had the same experience as us. There was enough feedback that Ridge invited some of us to come back up for a re-taste a couple weeks later, where they tasted as they should.
So, with the moderately mature wines at proper temperature, but the air temperature at around 96F, this effect was consistent over many bottles from 3 vintages over the course of the day. Something worth being aware of.
It would change the various evaporation rates. So, the primary effect would be on what reaches your olfactory receptors and at what proportion. Of course the temperature something is when it hits your receptors has an impact, and the ambient temperature and humidity have an effect on you, probably both on input and processing of data.
No, relative humidity does not affect evaporation of anything but water. That’s a common misunderstanding of the concept of partial pressures. Either way, my contention is that if local weather conditions do actually impact the perception of wine, it’s all due to perception, psychology, perhaps physiology, but not some real change in the wine itself.
I saw a post a few weeks ago (don’t recall who/where), where a producer was admitting some time in their past they tried picking by the biodumbantic calendar and it turned out wines they were very unhappy with, the pick days being too far from optimal for what they wanted to make. (I guess Captain Obvious was on vacation and the Holiday Inn was fully booked that week.)
I’ll look forward to the note. Arcadian’s style of wine can yield scintillating results…I have a few bottles, but I don’t think I’m officially on their mailing list because I never get notice of any releases…I just buy direct from the winery from time to time. Love the half bottles!
