Coulée de Serrant down the drain

[MLipton]

originally posted by SFJoe:
"I would distinguish chemically between biologically oxidized wines like sous (where is that bridge, Mark?) voile Jura or Sherry, and others..."

Has anybody seen the bridge?

You should think about a teaching gig when you tire of banking, old thing.

Mark Lipton

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

Sigh, this is our regular programming. And Jimmy Page can't solo for shit.

 

[Brad Kane]

originally posted by MLipton:
In a white wine, I'd look to polymerization of the phenolics and oxidation of alcohol to acetate as possible oxidative half-reactions to balance the equation.

That's how Mark gets all the ladies.

 

[SFJoe]

originally posted by Brad Kane:

originally posted by MLipton:
In a white wine, I'd look to polymerization of the phenolics and oxidation of alcohol to acetate as possible oxidative half-reactions to balance the equation.

That's how Mark gets all the ladies.

He did very well in that department.

 

[SFJoe]

originally posted by MLipton:

You should think about a teaching gig when you tire of banking, old thing.

Today could be that day.

--The Weary Banker

 

[MLipton]

originally posted by SFJoe:

originally posted by Brad Kane:

originally posted by MLipton:
In a white wine, I'd look to polymerization of the phenolics and oxidation of alcohol to acetate as possible oxidative half-reactions to balance the equation.

That's how Mark gets all the ladies.

He did very well in that department.

Jean appreciates that comment.

Mark Lipton

 

[Carl Steefel]

Back to the wine in question, we just had the 2002 Joly Coulee de Serrant on Saturday. Beautiful, aromatic wine with orange peel on the nose, touch of ginger, apples, all with a slightly bitter(?) floral note. Perhaps even more distinctive on the palate, where the lingering residual sugar (there, despite the "Sec" designation) vies with the slightly bitter finish, quinine and orange peel again. We had it up against a 2005 Huet Vouvray Clos du Bourg Sec and the Joly was much darker colored. I would say the wine was certainly on the fast track, perhaps at or close to maturity even though only 9 years old.

 

[Brad Kane]

originally posted by Carl Steefel:
Back to the wine in question, we just had the 2002 Joly Coulee de Serrant on Saturday. Beautiful, aromatic wine with orange peel on the nose, touch of ginger, apples, all with a slightly bitter(?) floral note. Perhaps even more distinctive on the palate, where the lingering residual sugar (there, despite the "Sec" designation) vies with the slightly bitter finish, quinine and orange peel again. We had it up against a 2005 Huet Vouvray Clos du Bourg Sec and the Joly was much darker colored. I would say the wine was certainly on the fast track, perhaps at or close to maturity even though only 9 years old.

I think Joly started with the oxidative style with the '94 or '95.

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

originally posted by Brad Kane:

originally posted by Carl Steefel:
Back to the wine in question, we just had the 2002 Joly Coulee de Serrant on Saturday. Beautiful, aromatic wine with orange peel on the nose, touch of ginger, apples, all with a slightly bitter(?) floral note. Perhaps even more distinctive on the palate, where the lingering residual sugar (there, despite the "Sec" designation) vies with the slightly bitter finish, quinine and orange peel again. We had it up against a 2005 Huet Vouvray Clos du Bourg Sec and the Joly was much darker colored. I would say the wine was certainly on the fast track, perhaps at or close to maturity even though only 9 years old.

I think Joly started with the oxidative style with the '94 or '95.

Yet no mention of it in Carl's note.

 

[Brad Kane]

originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:

originally posted by Brad Kane:

originally posted by Carl Steefel:
Back to the wine in question, we just had the 2002 Joly Coulee de Serrant on Saturday. Beautiful, aromatic wine with orange peel on the nose, touch of ginger, apples, all with a slightly bitter(?) floral note. Perhaps even more distinctive on the palate, where the lingering residual sugar (there, despite the "Sec" designation) vies with the slightly bitter finish, quinine and orange peel again. We had it up against a 2005 Huet Vouvray Clos du Bourg Sec and the Joly was much darker colored. I would say the wine was certainly on the fast track, perhaps at or close to maturity even though only 9 years old.

I think Joly started with the oxidative style with the '94 or '95.

Yet no mention of it in Carl's note.

I've found it oxidative every time I've had it, but I have a low tolerance for it.

 

[Chris Coad]

originally posted by Carl Steefel:
Back to the wine in question, we just had the 2002 Joly Coulee de Serrant on Saturday. Beautiful, aromatic wine with orange peel on the nose, touch of ginger, apples, all with a slightly bitter(?) floral note. Perhaps even more distinctive on the palate, where the lingering residual sugar (there, despite the "Sec" designation) vies with the slightly bitter finish, quinine and orange peel again. We had it up against a 2005 Huet Vouvray Clos du Bourg Sec and the Joly was much darker colored. I would say the wine was certainly on the fast track, perhaps at or close to maturity even though only 9 years old.

"Sec" designation? On a Coulée de Serrant? I haven't seen that, is that something they did in '02?

 

[Chris Coad]

originally posted by fatboy:

originally posted by Chris Coad:

Irregardless, it seems you could care less. Which begs the question: are you going to literally explode with rage if these usages don't jive?

nerd time: if you look at the frequency distribution of english adjectives, you see a cool interaction between relative frequency and whether the adjective is written or spoken. the realtive frequency of less common adjectives is far higher in written text.

what's more, across the whole language, the lower the frequency of a noun, the higher the probability is that it will be preceded by an adjective (or two). which means that, probabilistically, "surgeon" is way more likely to be preceded by an adjective than "man," even though it has a far 'more precise' meaning.

the not obvious (but likely correct) explanation for this is that adjectives don't work quite like we think they do, and that one of their main functions is to help make nouns more predictable (there are lots of nouns - and their number is constantly growing - so we need all the help we can get). needless to say, language that is more predictable is easier to understand, and unfortunately, along with the gold, the hot chicks and the sacred cows, the vikings also stole our gender system, which means we don't get all those little pointers that our germanic cousins enjoy.

this probably explains why, across the whole interweb, the nouns most likely to follow "cute little" are "puppy," "baby," and "kitten." it doesn't matter that every puppy, kitten and baby ever born is to some extent cute and little, because it turns out the way we use adjectives is more subtle than we suppose, which gets us to "literally."

if you look at the historical distribution of "literally", its growth starts around the time printing was invented, after which it really took off. and it is used far more in speech than text, most often to indicate that something less predictable is gonna happen. the kind of fancy shit that is more usually written than spoken, like, y'know, "literally exploded with rage."

predictability in speech and text are different (unless we're on the phone, speech is more liberallly laden with cues, making shit more predictable = less need for all the hand holding that low frequency adjectives provide in text). but, on the other hand, we can't go back and reread speech, we can only ask, "what?"

all of which means that it's highly likely that the 'correct' way of describing literary peavers is not to say that they are talking out of their asses, or that listening to them is analogous to watching a monkey licking its own balls, but that they are literally talking out of their asses, etc.

especially in speech.

fb.

ps. otherwise, kudos! great zinger.

Fascinating stuff, fatboy.

 

[Carl Steefel]

originally posted by Chris Coad:

originally posted by Carl Steefel:
Back to the wine in question, we just had the 2002 Joly Coulee de Serrant on Saturday. Beautiful, aromatic wine with orange peel on the nose, touch of ginger, apples, all with a slightly bitter(?) floral note. Perhaps even more distinctive on the palate, where the lingering residual sugar (there, despite the "Sec" designation) vies with the slightly bitter finish, quinine and orange peel again. We had it up against a 2005 Huet Vouvray Clos du Bourg Sec and the Joly was much darker colored. I would say the wine was certainly on the fast track, perhaps at or close to maturity even though only 9 years old.

"Sec" designation? On a Coulée de Serrant? I haven't seen that, is that something they did in '02?

Maybe I had better recheck. There were a lot of wines that night...

If by oxidative, one means something like sherry notes, then nothing of that kind. But the wine was clearly morphed from a primary, acid-dominated (or even sugar dominated) wine. However, the last wine I thought I had identified as "oxidative" turned out to be (according to Sharon Bowman) a pre-oxidative Selosse, so just a problem with a not so good cork.

Otherwise, I might have called this an oxidative style simply because it was maturing rapidly. But certainly not premox, since the wine was showing beautifully...

 

[Ian Fitzsimmons]

Per Mark,'reductive' isn't the opposite of 'oxidative,' is it, strictly speaking? He points out that reduction and oxidation are two ends of a single reaction: 'oxidation,' in this case, denoting reduction of oxygen atoms, as atmospheric O2 sweeps up electrons from high-enthalpy molecules in the wine solution, which are thereby oxidized. So isn't our usage of 'reductive' a malapropism?

If the energy gradients and electro-negativities among the various things in the sealed wine line up, so that a dominating redox reaction takes place, forming smelly sulfur compounds, you still have both reduction and oxidation, not one or the other. If the sulfur release is caused, instead, by biotic digestion of organic material for nitrogen (as Joe suggested in another discussion), then reduction doesn't take place at all (except as part of the yeasts' metabolic process).

Irregardless :), I vote with Jeff, where he quotes Joe, saying it takes a complex of reactions (likely biogenic) and rates to introduce a taste note of oxidation on a small enough scale to 'spice' the wine (in a way analogous to, in another recipe, judicious storage in new oak barrels), without sucking the life out of it. It's interesting how resourcefully people in different places find ways of making wines that taste good in such different styles, working by trial and error without much knowledge of chemistry.

 

[Mike Hinds]

originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Well, Richard Leroy claims that the light oxidativeness of his wines blows off with aeration, and friends who have opened his wines have confirmed this, so why wouldn't the oxidativeness of CdS blow off too, if it is indeed a reductive state? The recent ones I've tried (2004, 2005, 2006) were either not at all or very lghtly oxidative.

I've never had Leroy's wines - a troubling problem that will soon be rectified - but I can confirm that "oxidative" characteristics can actually blow off with aeration. I've experienced this a few times, and my poster children for this are Benoit Courault's marvelous Anjou chenins, which are almost or entirely SO2-free. Specifically, the wine shows some apple skin / cider / nut aromas upon first opening, but these aromas fade to a large degree and stronger fruit and mineral characteristics assume their rightful place. The wines become focused, expressive, drop-dead gorgeous. A spoiled, acetic wine would never do this.

Of a piece, the blancos of Lopez de Heredia are, of course, very stable. As an aside, I've heard it said that all of their red wines contain about 1% viura, due to that grape's ability to resist oxygen.

Reductive problems like H2S can also blow off, but I'm a lot less sure about cabbage-like mercaptans.

 

[SFJoe]

The Weary Banker is going to leave this one to another chemist.

 

[SFJoe]

originally posted by SFJoe:
The Weary Banker is going to leave this one to another chemist.

"This one" being Ian's post.

 

[SFJoe]

With H2S and thiols, I think it's a question of quantity. Cf. Cerasuolo thread.

 

[Carl Steefel]

The 2002 Joly we had might have fit this description of oxidative notes, with apple and orange peel. Except that they did not completely blow off (fortunately). What was missing (also fortunately) were the sherry (or aldehyde?) notes that I associate with premature oxidation. Quite a few reports of overt oxidation of the 2002 on the Web, however.

In terms of the Sec designation, I don't think the bottle had it on the label. But from what I have read, if there is no designation, the assumption is that it is Sec. Of course with an upper limit of 9 g/L (or 7?), that allows for quite a bit of R.S...

 

[SFJoe]

I think of apples as an oxidative note in chenin.