I suspect that those who claim there is no such thing as dumb phases have never really made a practice of buying a case of something and trying a bottle every year or two to work thru the case. I wouldn’t recommend doing this as you will waste a lot of bottles, but when I started buying good wine ages ago I would do this with Bordeaux because I was too impaitent and didn’t know any better, and didn’t have any aged wine around.
As promised, Kent Rasmussen on dumb phases in PS:
Hi, Kent here
It seems to me that Petite Sirah is one of the most interesting wines when it comes to the issue of aging and drinking. Young PS is big, rich, usually pretty tannic and above all full of luscious fruit. Funnily enough, unlike a Cab. Sauv., even though they are structurally huge, they are still very drinkable when they are young—mostly because of the charm of all the wonderful fruit. Once a PS is about 10-15 years old it usually starts to go through a “dumb” phase as it loses it’s fruit, but then when they get really old – 20-25 years they come around again like no other wine I have ever had….wonderful rich Bordeaux-like complexity…tons of that cedar-cigar box character that you always associate with really nice old clarets. So my recommend is drink them young or let them sit forever—most PS have the structure to handle the age.
What made me “an expert” on old PS: A few years ago there was a small wine shop in the San Francisco Bay Area that bought people’s cellars. He also bought our wine, but unfortunately, while the fellow who ran the shop was a nice guy, he didn’t pay his bills. One day I was in the shop (collecting a bill) and he had dozens of bottles from the late 1960s to about 1980 of California PS on a table…I said…why? And he told me that when he resold the wine he bought from collections he could never get anyone to take the PS. I made a deal with him that we would trade a bottle of our wine for a bottle of PS…he got something he could sell and I got paid. Over the course of the next year or so (before the IRS caught him) we traded about a hundred bottles and Celia and I had old old PS for dinner several nights each week. These were the great old fathers of PS…Concannon, Burgess, Freemark Abbey, Ridge, and so on. Other than an occasional corky bottle we never had a single one that was “over the hill”. It was a treat and a rare opportunity to learn about old PS.
And Peter Wellington:
Unfortunately, many aspects of wine quality are both subjective AND highly variable. The 5 -8 y.o. dumb phase is, at best, a generalization for top Bordeaux wines in a “typical” (if we even know what that is anymore) vintage. It certainly isn’t a hard and fast rule that can be applied to all red wines. Some will be completely dead before they are 8 y.o., while others may be very backward and tight at 8 y.o. The wine doesn’t quit developing; “dumb phase” is typified by a diminution of fruit aroma intensity without a lot of development of complex, secondary aromas (“bouquet”). Most people perceive wines in this stage to be less aromatic (“closed in”). Unfortunately, there is no sure fire way to know when a wine is in a dumb phase other than tasting that particular vintage regularly. Some wines never go through a dumb phase at all.
Sure it happens.
Not with all wines, not in all vintages - but in a lot of instances.
Just 3-4 examples:
structured red Burgundies like 2005, 1996, 1993 …
many white Hermitage …
many Bordeaux, e.g. also 2005 …
Loire whites (Coulee de Serrant …)
If you pop one of these in the wrong phase you might think the wine is a total failure, only to reopen after several years - and being better than ever.
It is impossible to predict exactly if and when its going to sleep, and when it will awake again … but some experience will help. My opinion: if it was fine from barrel (and/or) fine young from bottle - whats in the bottle will come out of it someday.
Some 1986 Bordeaux were hard as a nail for 1-2 deades, but more and more are becoming better than ever now, e.g. Talbot or Beychevelle …
The 1976 Burgundies were mostly disapointing when I tried several first in about 1989/90 - many are really fine now.
I haven’t had that many vintages of Huet, but I’ve never encountered a closed one. I’ve been drinking many 2007s recently and they drink great. When do you think the “closed phase” for Huet Vouvray takes place?
To the original question posed, I think it clearly does occur in some wines (Bordeaux most notably), but I think the majority of the time wine geeks pronounce a wine to be in a closed phase, it’s (a) a polite way to disagree about a wine (“Maybe your bottle was just in a closed phase when you tried it.” “Yes, that may have been it, I’ll try another in a few years.”), or (b) a wine that simply is too young and was never really in a tasty spot to begin with. That’s just my unscientific guess, I could be wrong.
The general rule I’ve heard for red Burgundies is that they close down about three years after the vintage, and the villages and some of the 1er cru wines tend to reopen at about eight years; grand cru take longer to reopen. Of course, there are plentiful exceptions to this timeline. Some of my 99’s were open much more than three years but did eventually go into a dumb phase.,
Definitely occurs with Vintage Port.
Ummm. What was the question?
There often is more than one period for vintage port. Typically, starts around 6-7 years after harvest and lasts for 5-8 years past that. There is also a second phase which sometimes occurs for a shorter period around the 35-40 year mark for VP’s.
Some producers have attributed this to the fortifying spirit used in Port. And they say with better control of and now higher quality they can source this may change that. It will be some time before we really know if that is the case or not. But it will be fun getting to test the theory. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}