Celebration and comfort

S

Saina Nieminen

Saina Nieminen
I had much reason to celebrate today (I finished a massive translation project and my favourite candidate made it to the next round in our presidential elections), so I opened up the best wine I have in my cellar: Pépière Muscadet Sèvre et Maine "Granite de Clisson" 2007 which just a few months ago was a vibrant, mineral, leesy delight, really one of the best whites I have had, and its only problem was that it was still too young.

But youngness be damned, it was delicious, so to celebrate I opened my last one. The cork had a bluish tinge to it. The colour of the wine was dark and the scent was that of bruised apples; it seemed tired and its shoulders were hunched and its joints were creaking.

POX in Muscadet!?

On the other hand, Musar 2003 - the red one - is starting to turn around. I had a bottle just after it was released, and while 2003 may not have been an exceptional heat wave in the Bekaa like it was in Europe, it still was a dark, inky beast like no other Musar I have had. Two years on it tastes of Musar. So it was yummy, but it does really need a decade more.
 
I had a Y2K Clos des Briords recently that I suspected of premox.

I am shocked to hear of it in 2007 Granite de Clisson. So shocked, that I can't believe it and would prefer to attribute it to an ordinary crappy cork.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
I had a Y2K Clos des Briords recently that I suspected of premox.

I am shocked to hear of it in 2007 Granite de Clisson. So shocked, that I can't believe it and would prefer to attribute it to an ordinary crappy cork.
Click to expand...

As luck would have it, I had a bottle of '07 G de Clisson just last night as well. It showed no pox. Was its vibrant, delightful mineraly, if youthful, self. I am hoping my bottle is more representative for the NYC supply than Otto's. (And I hope for Otto's sake, and Finish muscadet lovers more generally, that Joe's diagnosis, or some other one-off cause, was the culprit.)
 
Writing of, has anyone had the 09, and does anyone know whether the yield was much lower for 09? I was told the second city will receive zero bottles.
 
All wines under cork suffer from random premature oxidation to some extent. It's not talked about as much but I bet it affects at least as many bottles as TCA, and it's particularly a problem if the wine is low-SO2.
 
originally posted by robert ames:
i think newt shat in your wine. like he does everything else.
Click to expand...

One of these shat in my wine? I had no idea their geographical distribution extended so far north nor that their shit has such effects on wine.

I'm glad to hear that no one else has had problems. But it is always a frightening experience when the other bottles have been fine and have had identical transport and storage conditions. And then that blueish colour to the cork is never reassuring (though why exactly is that considered to correlate with POX?).
 
originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
originally posted by robert ames:
i think newt shat in your wine. like he does everything else.
Click to expand...

One of these shat in my wine? I had no idea their geographical distribution extended so far north nor that their shit has such effects on wine.

I'm glad to hear that no one else has had problems. But it is always a frightening experience when the other bottles have been fine and have had identical transport and storage conditions. And then that blueish colour to the cork is never reassuring (though why exactly is that considered to correlate with POX?).
Click to expand...

The good old cork blues were discussed http://winedisorder.com/comment/56/5835/
here not long ago in which SFJoe mentioned the blue tinged cork in another Marc Ollivier wine [Y2K Clos des Briords] that he refers to again in this thread.

At least that one had been 10 years in the bottle though - unlike the 2007 Clisson above.

OTOH just as there is still no universally accepted general or special theory of the cause of the pox IMO it would seem unlikely, given the generality of many of the major suspects [riper grapes = lower acids + much lower SO2, despite the debit of higher pH, conditioned partly by the demand for more 'natural' wine plus introduction of sulphite labelling requirements and on and on] that any white wine that will be kept for more than a few years will not have some added propensity to oxidise.

I say ‘added’ because there have always been some bottles, particularly of white wines, including white Burgundy, that have oxidised prematurely just nothing like the plague that began in the mid-90s and even that has been perversely selective with some people/groups being very much more unlucky than others.

As SFJoe says, the blue connection to the pox is empirical but very random i.e. many more of the admittedly small fraction of poxed bottles that are reported and discussed on these Boards have not had a blue cork mentioned than have had - and one of the very few Burgundy studies that has been published [2007] concluded, among other things, that H2O2 bleaching/cleansing did not correlate with their observations of the pox in the study.
 
I've only encountered good bottles of Y2K Briords so far, fingers crossed. In its normal state, it is quite youthful, but without any puppy fat remaining from that fairly ripe vintage, so if anything it can be slightly ungenerous but in no way oxidised, naturally or otherwise.

Nigel, in my experience early premox in white burgundy prior to mid-late 90s was fairly predictable when separated by producers. There was also very little randomness involved - if chassagne chenevottes from X was oxidised, it was so in every bottle I had touched, and if chassagne ruchottes from Y was fine, not only was every bottle OK but it appears to be OK to this day. Things could not have been more different in the late 90s, on every account.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top