I think the problem here would be that the sample size would be extremely variable - aka, the drinker. Depending on what you’re seeing, doing, eating, drinking, feeling, or paying attention to each time you opened a bottle would have far more implications for your assessment than any changes in the contents of the bottle, I think.
In regards to wine shutting down after being open for X amount of time; I also believe that some wines that have the perception of shutting down are merely just you smelling and drinking it for an hour, two, three and your brain recognizing that information as increasingly familiar. Over time, they will seem less poignant, powerful, or interesting, and this phenomenon is borne out by science.
I will always take the fallibility and variability of the human body and brain from year to year/day to day/hour to hour over a relatively static and stable liquid.
This, and the Doug Hein post, describe what I think is going on as well as anything.
One thing I’ll postulate is that drinkers of domestic wines, which tend to be richer, riper, higher alcohol wines, may not experience the phenomenon as much as drinkers of more “traditional” wines from burgundy, bordeaux, piemonte, etc., though even in those regions some wines and vintages seem less prone to ever shutting down.
I like the idea that tannins play a big role, because my own experience is that white wines are far less likely to show poorly at some point in their lives than red wines.
In 30 years of wine appreciation, I have never had a wine of the continuously open phase that held a candle to a 1957 Bonnes Mares consumed in 1996. Notoriously tannic vineyard with a reputation for having a very long shut down phase. For me, great wine experiences generally often involve qualities that are both beautiful and rare(by dint of the wine actually being great rather than very, very good).
I would say that while I live on really good, and often relatively open wines, the reason I make wines is due to the wines requiring significant patience, that eventually do make their way into a place where few other wines can find their way to(including the wines of the aforementioned Hubert de Montille).
I don’t think that tracks with the critical review of wines with more, more, more as the best. Often that’s more fruit and must weight, which isn’t really what the great wines of the old world were about. I’m not really a fan of 05 red Burgundy. They’ve always felt heavy to me rather than shut down. I’ll be happy to be proved wrong, and a lot of people I respect really feel they are great.
I also think that significant tannin and phenolics are necessary for great wines, and that doesn’t often seem to jibe with heralded vintages(2002 Piedmont, 1997 Napa, etc). But polymerization binding up the flavor and fruit molecules is also preserving them. And in my opinion, also enhancing them broadening the range of expression within wines that have significant phenolics.
Human fallability can play a part, and aeration of the wine can still be a reality as well.
However, it doesn’t explain the bottles that just keep getting better and better. Or the ones that are just tight, until that last bit of the last glass when suddenly the wine turns that corner and is amazing.
I bought 6x2010 Malescasse, the first 3 from 2018 to 2020 were hard tannic and for my palate shut down. The 4th around the new year was opening up, broader, and excellent with food. The final 2 were unfortunately corked.
This…spot on. Wine is in essence alive. Peaks and valleys in regards to flavor and texture personality over time simply due to complex chemistry. Nearly impossible to blanket an explanation why there are “shut down” phases across the vast scope of wines made all over the world.
1986 Mouton arrived as a dazzling flavor circus of primary fruit.
IIRC, about a year later shut down/dumb phase set in and it was tighter than a drum for a couple of decades, then offering a only glimpse with decanting and coaxing.
It has always seemed to me that people truly don’t know shit about the real biochemistry of wine aging. Yeah, there’s a lot of handwaving (“compounds”, “tannin chains”, “polymerization” blah blah blah) but nothing actionable that would render the process predictable or able to be engineered in a reliable manner without crippling tradeoffs in wine quality. Which is really good from the perspective of the mystery and magic of our hobby and the value of our wine collection, but really bizarre when you consider how important aging is to the quality of wine.
In the early part of this century I think Bordeaux tried to change winemaking to make wine accessible earlier, through more fruit and ripeness etc., but vintages like 2000 and 2005 (and I suspect 2010 as well) shut down super hard and if anything seem to be taking longer to come around than 1980s vintages. I suspect the same may happen with e.g. 2016.
Of course, anecdotal experience on something like this has so much potential for bias and misinterpretation that it’s totally meaningless. There has been a study, which I think you’re probably aware of.
I find it interesting that so many highly knowledgeable people (I’m putting you in that group, for what it’s worth) think a calendar some wingnut made up decades ago, arbitrarily, that was then applied to wine tasting in a way said wingnut never intended or even alluded to, actually has the claimed effect, all based on “evidence” that couldn’t possibly be statistically significant or meaningful in any real way.
I guess I should say I don’t mean to be rude, and I’m genuinely sorry if this comes across that way, but I can’t think of a way to softly state this without losing the point of how ridiculous it is. I’m sure I believe some ridiculous things too. I have friends who believe this too, and I respect them, but it is still ludicrous, and I’ll tell them I think so too (already have in some cases).
Thank you for saying this. As someone who owes their living to wine chemistry, I find conversations about it outside of a work setting - and even sometimes within one - to be a bit of a mixed bag. This is particularly true with phenolics - it’s pretty common that I will hear someone explain something about a wine’s sensory qualities and development by invoking phenolic chemistry in a way that I pretty much know to be incorrect but do not have a good answer for. I have been fortunate to have a wonderful and sanguine phenolic chemistry mentor who gladly acknowledges the gaps in his own knowledge and our collective knowledge, i.e., we know enough to make practical use of that knowledge, but it is such an astonishingly complex topic that there is always something more to learn. It’s one thing to say “tannin quantitation helps winemakers assess extraction in fermenting wines that still have sufficient RS to make sensory assessment unreliable” and quite another to say something specific about how tannin polymerization in bottle relates to the relative availability of aroma compounds at a given point in a wine’s evolution. I don’t think that the latter is intractable, but some people who know a little bit about wine chemistry talk as if they know everything about wine chemistry and they do it confidently enough and sound sensible enough that other people believe them. I think that’s generally ok, really - the stakes are pretty low - but it does make these kinds of conversations tricky; especially if you want to expand your knowledge of a topic, sorting reliable information from conjecture can be difficult.
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.
