I worked weekends at a winery tasting room many years ago. This is important because it means I got to taste the same wines and often multiple bottles of those wines every week. Most of the wines never changed during the entire time I worked there. Yes, there would be the occasional off bottle or just a bottle that tasted slightly different.
But we had a Merlot that was shut down hard when I started working there and stayed that way through up until my final few months. Until it opened up, I thought the wine was just a poorly made wine, probably the worst wine we sold. The two vintages that came after it were much better, more complex, better red fruit, some nice spice. This wine was a muddled black fruited mess with no acidity and offered little interest. Then it started to open up. The nose became more fragrant, the flavors more defined, the whole wine gained a harmony that it didn’t have before. It stayed that way for about a month and shut down again. It stayed shut down for another month or so at which point things get even weirder. Not sure if it was bottle difference or if the wine was really changing that much but each week seemed different than the one prior. Sometimes, it seemed more open and then back to shut down. Eventually, it settled out into a nice wine, nothing spectacular but much better than I originally thought it would ever be and it maintained this new profile up to the point when I left.
That experience has convinced me that talking about shut down is difficult when we generally only drink a few bottles and often those bottles are separated in time by months. I don’t know how we know shut down from those few data points. We as wine drinkers often build up a belief that a certain type of wine shuts down at a certain age but do we really have enough data to make those claims? The three merlots that the winery made were all from the same vineyard and treated basically the same. The ripeness was similar and yet only the one wine shut down and the other two didn’t. Why, I have no clue.
As to your first point: yes, I most often find that a wine which is more vibrant upon opening and then retreats behind its structure is a wine which is entering a shut-down phase. Often it was a wine I hope dto catch while still in its fresher, youthful window and have taken a bit of a gamble on.
As to your second point, I find it interesting that you say wine “may” shut down. I just don’t see that there is a lot of question as to that fact. You note that “we as a community” are quick to make that judgment, but the WB community has a lot of experience, often with many, many vintages of the same region, producer, and wine. If I’m reading posts by knowledgeable burg or Piedmont people saying that a wine is shut down or shutting down I would tend to believe that the bottle they opened was, indeed, shut down. I would not suspect, for instance, that the wine is dying or dead or will not, in time, show very well. A top quality five to ten year old Burg or Barolo which shows all acid or tannin, respectively, is going to make for relatively unpleasant drinking, but I would be very confident that it will show well again in time, provided for proper storage conditions.
Is there that much wine out there that tastes “shut down” because it’s mediocre? Closed or shut down to me means very little aroma and very little fruit on the palate, mostly acid and tannin. Not that being closed is necessarily a sign that the wine is NOT mediocre, I suppose, but when I taste bad wine it usually has plenty of aroma and plenty of fruit and/or oak on the palate, it’s just that those flavors and aromas aren’t very pleasant. I can certainly tell the difference between a bad wine that’s very giving of aromas and flavors and a closed wine that isn’t giving much of anything, but maybe not between a closed wine that will be good when it opens up and a closed wine that will be bad when it opens up.
So if there are wines that are open for business and good, and wines that are open for business and bad, and wines that are closed but will one day open for business (and be good or bad once they do), is there really a fifth category of wines that are all tannin and acid, with no aromas and no fruit flavors, not because they are closed but because they’re bad and they will always taste that way? Seems theoretically possible, but how much is out there that really fits that description?
I have nothing intelligent or sensible to contribute to this discussion!! But, nonetheless, I will.
I’m with Larry on this. I think this is sort of a catch-all term that people use when they have a wine that doesn’t live up to
their expectations. Ten it is “closed down”.
I don’t think I can recall a wine that I’ve had that I would call “shut down”. I often try wines right of the boat when they arrive. There have been times when I’ve retried them
several months later and they don’t seem to be the wine I first had. “Shut down”?? I have no friggin’ idea. Maybe my memory of the wine was not as good. It happens
with old age. Maybe there is something chemical going on in the wine that does make it muted from what it was? I haven’t a clue.
But it’s not a term that I ever use and often look askance when I see the term used in a TN. I would have to taste & retaste a btl frequently to actually identify
it as being “shut down”. I don’t often do that with a wine…taste it repeatedly over & over during a short period of time.
Tom
A good example might be Hermitage Blanc. The upper level cuvees are incredibly floral and amazing to drink when very young. They then morph into nice wines between 3 years after bottling to about the 15 year mark. What emerges on the other end is a heady elixir that is again floral, heady, and bold, but has much more depth of flavor.
Good discussion of a challenging topic, thanks everyone for trying to make sense of this without throwing stones. I think Brian and Tom have really nailed a major difficulty of identifying ‘shut down.’ We typically are not drinking a bottle of a particular wine once or more a year over long periods of time. When those ITB get to do that they can provide interesting examples.
I do find that some wines that were exuberant in youth (E.g. red Burgs in my experience) seem to get quiet 5-10ish years from vintage. So I’ve taken to not opening them in that phase. My most valuable resources on this subject are this board and CT. While there is a lot of junk in CT, wines with multiple tastings over the years usually have enough coherent notes that you can read between the lines and have a good sense of whether a wine is wide open or not. Take a look at 2010 Meo Camuzet aux Brûlée’s. Seems like it is showing some good characteristics but based on the pattern of notes I wouldn’t open this wine in 2021. Poke around and you can find many similar examples.
And also: there is certainly no universal pattern to this. There are some very rough patterns you can find in a particular Variety/Region/Style/Vintage. E.g Red Burgs from traditional producers made in highly structured vintages (Such as 2010 Chevillon) are likely to have a more pronounced and earlier shut down period.
More structured Barolo in my experience can shut down within an hour or two of opening when young. Fresh and well fruited at first, then a wall of tannin comes down blocking all else. A sure sign to put aside for 5 or 10 years.
I actually find young classified red Bordeaux among the most difficult to assess in youth. Rough, austere, mouth puckering when released, then shut down for a decade or more, finally emerging as something amazing.
When a wine of unremarkable pedigree is out of balance, it’s presumed to be simply bad quality. I think this is often a reasonable enough presumption since there’s no track record that would lead you to believe the wine will improve over time — or even last long enough to potentially improve. Then, the inverse is also often true - again IMO at least somewhat reasonably - which is that if a wine of great pedigree is not showing well (and does not suffer from an unrecoverable flaw like premox or TCA), that BECAUSE it will hang on long enough to change, that it may show better at some point in the future. I think that’s especially true if that producer or even region has a track record of the same.
I’ve tasted a wine at Rosenblum from the barrel afore it was bttld. And then the same wine just has it’s come off the bottling line.
“Btl shock” from bttlg is indeed an effect that I acknowledge.
But “btl shock” from driving a btl home from my local wine shop, or “btl shock” from being trucked in a UPS truck up from SantaFe,
or “btl shock” from being on a FedEx truck travelling in from Calif is not something I believe in. I’ve done the experiment & published the
article in Vintage magazine that I’ve posted somewhere on WB & I don’t believe in it. OTOH, Oliver McCrum has tasted wines side-by-side that just
came off the boat from Italy and one that had been in his warehouse for a year. He believes in “btl shock” from travelling. And I believe him.
Tom
Some thoughts - from my experience - some are mysterious
I remembering importing a brand of Champagne and some specific Cuvees we checked every few weeks and although we do everything careful in the transport from France, the journey knocks the hell out of the integrity of the wine. I began to realize as the weeks turned to months, that the wine is a living organism and like I get roughed up from a long journey, the bruised wine needed 6 months to restore
I was reading reviews yesterday - researching what review & score to use of some fine wines from the '80s & '90s. a well known and loved 2nd growth & 1st growth had some many different tasting notes that differed - yet no one mentioned the fact of the living evolution of a wine. It is not a snap shot that remains “as it is”. A wine is alive and evolves.
Before you open a bottle how often do you consider - ‘is it is a fruit day - or a root day’? A flower day or Leaf day? My experience - this is real stuff. That really affects how a wine will drink that day. This is the same calendar as the Organic & Bio-Dynamic Domains
I remember drinking a bottle that was about 35 years old and written off with a 76 pt review from Mr. Parker. When I tasted it , that was so lush, gorgeous.
These wines evolve and go through cycles…
I’m certain many of the wine lovers here will have many more reasons like these to add…
Wines merely going through a less-than-optimal phase are not “shut down”. Shut down is raw tannin and acid, no fruit and pretty much nothing else showing.
I think there is a distinction from a “dumb phase”, where a wine just isn’t showing much. That is on the science of perception side, where compounds in a shut down wine may be doing a sort of misdirection, so your receptors pick up fruity aromatic compounds, but your brain’s sensory processing prioritizes warning you about potential lethal toxins and sets aside the attractive data. Dumb brain just trying to be helpful. Sorry, it evolved this way.
I think the perception side is evident in marginal cases, where in a group tasting some people experience a wine as delightful and others get next to nothing. As in where those people finding the wine muted would have found that wine expressive at a younger point and will again at a later point.
On the wine itself side there many changes taking place, where sensory compounds literally form weak bonds that make them imperceptible. Some young wines cycle in an out of this, which is why some winemakers don’t like to provide barrel tasting, and those who do will curate what’s being sampled. It’s also one of the reasons why a wine may wait in bottle before release. Even some fairly mature wines can experience such short phase cyclical bottle variation. (Ridge sat on their library '94 Monte Bello for several years because of this, then released them when the variation stopped. That’s their candid opinion. Certainly anomaly, but a concept they were more than familiar with, backed up by extensive observation.) Many classic wines go through predictable long-phase states of being shut down or dumb. What’s going on in a wine’s evolutionary pathway isn’t a mystery, it’s covered in the textbooks. But, those focus on the winemaking side, not cellaring. Individual wines vary so much in their spectrums of variables, science will likely always be less helpful than anecdote to collectors aging wines.
It’s common with Vintage Port. But it’s not a uniform thing nor does it always happen. I was lead to understand it’s cause is the the plethora of chemical reactions that occur with aging. Reactions occur at different rates and the resultant compounds may not be in balance with others.
And herein lies the problem - if a wine does not show ‘as expected’, many jump to the conclusion that it’s either ‘shut down’ or perhaps ‘mildly corked’.
And my guess is that this happens most often when a wine is served non-blind
For the sake of clarity and consistency, I think should stick to using “shutting down” in the context of one day reawakening. Low level TCA will not allow that.
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