Actually, Google Translate does pretty well with Norwegian, so the article was pretty easy to understand. Thanks, though.
Seems reasonably well argued to me.
Unfortunately, not to me. That is to say, it's well-argued if one accepts his assumptions, which I can't.
It seems to me that there are three facts on which there's agreement:
1) Some producers are more regularly affected than others.
2) In some cases, not all bottles of a given wine are equally affected, or affected at all.
3) While there were certainly some oxidized wines in the past, something happened in the mid-90s (give or take a few years) that led to systematic premature oxidation on a scale unlike any seen before.
Am I missing anything?
From 1, we can conclude that there's something some people are doing, and others aren't doing (or vice-versa) that's contributing to the problem. This "something" might be in the vineyard, it might be in the cellar, it might be at bottling, it might be something out of the control of the winemaker (e.g. weather) or it might be a comination of more than one thing.
From 2, we can conclude that there's a cause of bottle variation from otherwise identical sources. This either has to come from variation in pre-bottling vessels and/or bottling chemistry -- multiple bottling runs with poor oxygen control, perhaps, or separate lots from separate barrels -- or the closure. Since many of the affected wines that we're talking about are very small-production wines, and thus likely to be bottled all at once or nearly so, the closure seems a far more obvious culprit. Especially since we know that, aside from TCA, the chief (one is tempted to say the only) cause of bottle variation in cork-finished wines is variable oxygen transmission by corks. Since we're looking for a cause of oxidation, there would have to be pretty good counter-evidence for me to think that the corks are
not involved somehow.
But we also know, at least from what I've read and heard so far, that the same corks are being used by some affected
and some unaffected producers. Which means that we cannot conclude that corks are the sole culprit. Now, maybe this information is incorrect and it will turn out that all the affected producers are using a different kind or preparation of cork than their unaffected neighbors, and if so that would be very, very compelling. But if most everyone's using the same cork (type and treatment) whether or not they're afflicted with premox, we can conclude that while cork must contribute to the problem, it is not a lone actor. It must be working in concert with something else. And this is why I find Ronold's argument lacking, because it doesn't fit all the available evidence, only some of it. All the elements he lists as
the causes might be, and quite possibly are,
probable causes. But he dismisses at least one that
has to be a contributing cause (cork), and thus attributes undue surety to the others he lists.
Fact 3 would seem to add weight to the cork-as-cause theory, because I keep reading that there was a change in the cork coating from some producers in the mid-90s, but from what I've been able to gather there is not one-to-one correspondence between producers who used the newly-treated cork and producers who have experienced problems with premox. If this is true, than based on the three available facts, the cork must contribute, and it must contribute in a non-uniform way, but unless we can isolate it as a variable -- that is, it was the
only change an affected winery made between a clean vintage and a problem vintage -- we still have to look elsewhere. I believe that this sort of isolation has already been dismissed in most cases, but I must add the caveat that maybe there are new data or test results of which I'm not aware. They would be interesting to read, if so.
So to solve the problem, we need:
A) Data on the processes and closures used at as many wineries, affected and un-affected, as possible. The answer is likely to lie somewhere within the correlations.
B) Data on what changed in whatever vintage a given winery started exhibiting problems, which should be compared to the correlations concluded from A. This should add clarity to the picture.
C) Hopefully, by then we have likely, or at least potential, culprits, and can address the problem either with new technology or a return to older technology. Then we wait and see if the solutions work. Failing that, we could throw a bunch of solutions at the wall and see what sticks, but that's obviously not an ideal solution. Of course, unless the problem has magically gone away in the intervening years, even when we do figure it out the likely cause(s) it's going to be many more years before we know if we've fixed them. Which is why you will not find me paying for white Burgundy.
Trimbach CFE 96 are curiously suspicios.
Not yet in my experience, but then I don't expect a '96 CFE to taste like much of anything at this stage. It would be a curious thing, though, because '96 was not a hot vintage, nor is Trimbach exactly afraid of sulfur, nor has (to my knowledge, which may be incomplete) their winemaking or bottling chemistry changed in any significant way. If a CFE were to start exhibiting problems based on the hot-vintage theory, it would almost certainly have to be the '97, wouldn't it?
