Sure, the old school explanations are what they say publicly, just like BdM, but I’m certain most if not all of these places first experimented with DIAM many years ago and have tried the wines out of DIAM bottles over the years. The reason they give the old school explanation is because they aren’t doing it right to make DIAM work. (I asked the BdM winemaker to try one of the wines under DIAM and he said “I don’t go to bed on the first date.” 
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I really want more transparency into supply chain and would love to understand the impact that it has had on American’s and their experience with premox. This is one of the big challenges that I would love to see tackled with technology. Imagine if you could scan something on a bottle with your smartphone and it would tell you what temps a wine was exposed to during transit. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about large quantities of wines left palletized on a loading dock for multiple days in the heat of summer. I’ve purchase a lot of wine at auction that has never left Europe and then had it shipped via air in November or March with some producers that are famous for premox - never had an issue with those wines. However, with wines purchased in the states… My incidence of premox has been a lot higher. Your H. Boillot is my Dauvissat. I’ve never had a bottle of poxed Dauvissat and it’s my 3rd largest holding…
No chance. The people who would pay for this technology are the same ones who would be negatively effected by it.
I’ll hold out hope. With the right tech, it could be done at the producer level for highly allocated wines. I won’t hold my breath for any time remotely soon, but if DRC decided to implement something like this, it’s not like Wilson and Daniels would start refusing to import the wines.
The producer is one of the parties I referenced. It hurts them in the end if either the importer has to eat an entire pallet of wine or they have to eat it. Even if the importer eats it, very few producers are like DRC that have enough caché to keep the importer coming back next year.
Producers get dropped eventually because importers don’t want to deal with the hassle. Then you also end up with a bunch of unhappy retailers and customers who don’t get the wine. Most of those people don’t know the difference anyway. So then producers get dropped again because of the hassle.
It’s the same reason that you end up with so much gray market allocated wine. The producers operate on a don’t ask don’t tell policy about a lot of that stuff. As long as the wine sells every year and they get paid, they don’t really want to know the intricacies of distribution or deal with it.
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Mayber DRC was a poor example - there are plenty of producers in Burgundy that have the “caché” to do so. Prior to DIAM everyone said "serious collectors would never purchase a wine not under cork” etc. It doesn’t hurt an allocated producer. They all have a line of importers out the door that would happily do business with them on the grounds that they needed to be extra careful with the wines. I think the stronger argument would be the tech isn’t there yet. If it was cheap, small, user friendly, and marketed correctly someone would implement it, and all it takes is one. An importer could theoretically implement it on a back label to win business from allocated domaines. There are plenty of capitalist incentives to create such a product, but there are also plenty of logistical challenges to creating a discrete thermoteter that pings the cloud with temp data multiple times a day.
Some producers definitely do care about their wines end to end.
This might ruin the old-world look and feal of a wine 
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His totals are probably 150 to 200ppm. I spoke to him and he basically adds as much as he can when he does his adds.
I’m very curious about this. @Andrew_K what type of adjustments are they saying would be needed? Shouldn’t having to use less sulfur be a good thing?
Plenty of other producers have figured out how to make it work. Olivier Lamy explained his reasoning behind using a DIAM30 to me. He told me that it guarantees a consistent product. If you open 12 bottles you’ll have 12 really closely tasting bottles. If you use natural cork your 12 bottles will have a wider range of variation as well as higher risk of flaws (premox and cork taint), even though you might have that one incredible bottle. I have also confirmed this with a top cork supplier; in a bag of the most expensive natural corks and there will be a fairly significant range of densities across the corks (the density of the cork affects how much oxygen is introduced to the wine upon entry). With micro-agglomerated corks the density of each cork are basically identically therefore you get a more a consistent product.
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Ponsot has been using some form of temperature tracking in their boxes for some time now.
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Here’s a screenshot from the release letter… You can still access the offer at this link - click on the wines and you can view the exact ppm for each wine. I highly doubt he would go to the trouble of erroneously adding lower incorrect numbers given that it is very rare for wine makers to provide this type of information.
Yes, free of 40ppm. I am referring to total. I spoke to Seth last month. He adds initially post malo. He does not like to add often so believes a few big adds carries him to the finish. It’s just when you do the adds, how you do the adds and the health of the wine (how much sulfur gets bound). There is also molecular, which is probably more important to pay attention to than free/total but that’s a different discussion.
Correction: apologies for overstating his total. It has been brought to my attention that his post malo adds are 70-90 or 120-150 just depends on the lot.
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WK has posted some things about all that’s affected. I’m not a winemaker so I don’t really remember all the details.
This is the key point. The amount of oxygen that permeates through bark cork is extremely variable, which is why the wines closed with it vary so much. This is particularly a problem when producers try to reduce the amount of sulfites they use.
As I understand it, paying more for cork does not guarantee oxygen transmission consistency at all, more expensive cork is just nicer to look at. Thirty years ago there were no plausible alternatives; now there are a number of them.
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Never thought my reply brought the thread a bit further.
Just had 22’ Sylvain Cathiard Bourgogne which uses DIAM5. Broke my Coravin’s needle a little.
Hi Oliver, are you saying Diam is one of the plausible alternatives, or that it also has highly variable oxygen transmission because it is still made of cork?
Sorry, David, I meant that Diam is one of the plausible alternatives. By ‘bark cork’ I meant old-fashioned solid cork.
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Thanks, that’s consistent with the marked reduction in premox associated with Diam-closed wines.
Absolutely, as I understand it the various Diam types have the oxygen transmission characteristics of very good bark cork, but consistent, whereas a batch of bark cork varies enormously. This should allow a winemaker to use less SO2 while still assuring a consistent product when opened.
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Just opened a 2022 Matrot Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru Les Chalumeaux and it had a Diam30 cork.
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We recently switched to all Diam at Testarossa Winery and haven’t looked back. I thought we would have consumer complaints about making the switch but nope. It is nice on bottling day as you can see a much more consistent corking process than in the past with natural cork. Since TCA incidence is nil, easier bottling days, and consumer is not pushing back, probably makes sense to make the switch if one hasn’t had to the courage to do so.