tiger lily overload: binner pinot noir, 2004

V

vaughn tan

vaughn tan
my first post to a dauntingly knowledgeable list -- but a wine disorder is a wine disorder.

so i picked up few bottles of 2004 pinot noir from binner. according to the merchant (BLM in brookline), these have been sitting untouched at the bottom of a heap of cases in their climate-controlled warehouse since jenny and francois handed it off to them, which is why i bought several of them on closeout. also, they were $5 each.

on opening, there was an incredibly powerful, heavy, stifling smell of tiger lilies (those very aromatic ones that people seem to scatter about in floral arrangements). it persisted for hours, making the wine undrinkable. the cork was intact and in good condition, though the colour in the glass was brickish. i resealed it with a silicone stopper and put it in the fridge on the off chance something would happen to it overnight.

today, it was completely drinkable and in fact quite nice. very lean and mildly funky, a little fresh sour cherry, lots of acidity, but also a bit unctuous and round -- totally different from last night. there's a peculiar aromatic note that reminds me of the only other binner wine i've ever had (their saveurs field blend from the 2011 vintage) but otherwise it seems odd in the way you'd expect a no-sulphur, unfiltered wine to be odd.

so my question is: what's this tiger lily smell all about? is this a known aromatic product of some particular yeast or bacterium, or an obscure wine defect? most mysterious and distracting; certainly preventing me from editing this chapter.

v
 
fuck off newbie, and welcome to winedisorder, where if you hang around long enough you may get to participate in a thread titled "Does Binner suck?"
 
Fuckoffhi!

Good question. And good price on the Binner, well worth the experiment.

I thought this post was going to be about the Luna song, however, and was sorely let down.

ETA: It puts me in mind of "The Big Sleep."

General Sternwood: You may smoke, too. I can still enjoy the smell of it. Hum, nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy. You're looking, sir, at a very dull survival of a very gaudy life, crippled, paralyzed in both legs, barely I eat and my sleep is so near waking it's hardly worth a name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a new born spider.

Marlowe: Yeah.

General Sternwood: The orchids are an excuse for the heat. You like orchids?

Marlowe: Not particularly.

General Sternwood: Nasty things. The flesh is too much like the flesh of men. Their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Fuckoffhi!

Good question.

I thought this post was going to be about the Luna song.
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And I thought that he was riffin' on "What's Up, Tiger Lily," which may still stand as my favorite Woody Allen flick.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Fuckoffhi!

Good question.

I thought this post was going to be about the Luna song.
Click to expand...

And I thought that he was riffin' on "What's Up, Tiger Lily," which may still stand as my favorite Woody Allen flick.

Mark Lipton
Click to expand...

Oh, not false, either.
 
What chapter, I wonder?

It has been a very long time, but you remind me of a couple of weird white wines I had many years ago. One was a very odd cold-fermentation wine, and another was treated with sorbate as an antimicrobial (perhaps a velcorin predecessor?). But they both had tons of terpenes.

I quite despise lilies, but I think of their scent as being mostly about lower terpenes. I could be wrong, and I'm sure there are other things in the mix, but the sort of geraniol, linalool end of the world is where I think lilies reside.

This is a long and pedantic way of saying that I really have no idea. But I'll give it some thought. Perhaps those with a more sensitive finger on the pulse of secondary metabolites can pitch in. Prof. Lipton?
 
originally posted by Zachary Ross:
fuck off newbie, and welcome to winedisorder, where if you hang around long enough you may get to participate in a thread titled "Does Binner suck?"
Click to expand...

i look forward to the day.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:

I quite despise lilies, but I think of their scent as being mostly about lower terpenes. I could be wrong, and I'm sure there are other things in the mix, but the sort of geraniol, linalool end of the world is where I think lilies reside.

This is a long and pedantic way of saying that I really have no idea. But I'll give it some thought. Perhaps those with a more sensitive finger on the pulse of secondary metabolites can pitch in. Prof. Lipton?
Click to expand...

i despise oriental lilies too. because of the aroma: unsubtle and crass. thanks for the tip on the terpenes; i would like to know if there are consistent causes of the effect, if only to be better able to avoid it.

out of curiosity, i opened another bottle of the binner pinot about an hour ago. this one tasted distinctly cooked, but it had a similar lily smell which has not yet dissipated.
 
Jeez. Chasing around the interwebz looking for lily-scented terpenes is not an easy thing. My initial hunting techniques have produced conspicuously divergent results this time:
...a discussion of terpenes in riesling from Tom Stevenson
...another discussion of terpenes but as it relates to pot growing
...and "Royal Blush" wine with label art based on those naked Prince Harry photos

Tiger Lilies? Not even a mention yet.
 
This is quite interesting because I had a similar experience with a few bottles of Binner back in 2003. The wines were all white, although I forget the specifics, one was a TPG, and one may have been a Muscat. And the whole experience was the reason I never became a regular at Caves Augé.

I had bought them all from Augé and one night I opened a bottle to find a really strange smell (I can't say if it was exactly tiger lilies, but it sounds about right). I waited a while and nothing changed, so I opened another bottle because I needed wine for the evening. Same thing, so I opened yet another bottle because I still needed wine for the evening. At this point I was really perplexed because I had three different wines open, but all with similar pungent funky smells. I knew they weren't corked, but had no explanation.

So I drank something else and the next morning I took the bottles of Binner into Augé, looking for an explanation. I was not demanding my money back, or blaming them, but something clearly was wrong and I figured they might have some insight.

However, when we opened the bottles and took a taste, the funky pungency was gone and the bottles were all quite nice, much like your experience. I was embarassed, but more than happy to take them home and enjoy them.

But the folks at Augé seemed to take it really personally and began berating me for not understanding the wines. I suppose given the way they showed that morning you might think I wasn't the savviest taster for complaining, but surely these folks could understand that wines change over night.

I went back into Augé a few times after that, but each time they would bark out that I should only be offered 'classic' wines and that I wouldn't understand anything else. And this was not in a joking manner. So, I ceased shopping in the store, as they don't exactly have the market cornered on much in Paris. I also never pursued Binner very much. But the same could be said for Alsace in general.

So, all that to say, thanks for your post!
 
I find the Binner wines a bit variable - some I like, some, not so much. But I wouldn't write a whole region off on that basis. We did visit, and they make an amazingly broad number of wines (not quite Gassmann-esque, but close) and some were excellent.

I do find that some of the more "popular" producers (Zind Humbrecht, for one) leave me cold, and some wines are a bit of a crapshoot for sweetness and thus difficult to match with food - but if I'd seen the Binner for $5 at BLM, I'd have grabbed them all. Despite my wife's insistence that they all smell like kosher hot dogs, I've really liked quite a number of Alsacian Pinot Noir.

BLM! I haven't been in there for years! Do they still do tastings using the little plastic shot glasses? That always bothered me.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Jeez. Chasing around the interwebz looking for lily-scented terpenes is not an easy thing.
Click to expand...

There are an awful lot of terpenes in the world, and probably non-terpenic contributors to lily aroma. Still in the genus.
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Yeah, I was going to say that lilies remind me more of volatile esters than terpenes, but then again there are terpenes and then there are terpenes, you know. Good call on the linalool, BTW.

Mark Lipton
 
I am perplexed by the overnight change. Muscat still tastes like muscat after a night in the fridge....
 
originally posted by Jay Miller:
Just for the record in my experience tiger lilies do not have that horribly noxious smell that one gets from stargazers.
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apologies -- i wrote tigerlilies and then later, after much desultory interweb time-wasting, realised that the ones i'm thinking about are probably a specific and different variety. oriental for sure, probably stargazer as you say.
 
originally posted by mlawton:
I find the Binner wines a bit variable - some I like, some, not so much. But I wouldn't write a whole region off on that basis. We did visit, and they make an amazingly broad number of wines (not quite Gassmann-esque, but close) and some were excellent.

I do find that some of the more "popular" producers (Zind Humbrecht, for one) leave me cold, and some wines are a bit of a crapshoot for sweetness and thus difficult to match with food - but if I'd seen the Binner for $5 at BLM, I'd have grabbed them all. Despite my wife's insistence that they all smell like kosher hot dogs, I've really liked quite a number of Alsacian Pinot Noir.

BLM! I haven't been in there for years! Do they still do tastings using the little plastic shot glasses? That always bothered me.
Click to expand...

i tried to grab all the binner i could -- their inventory said there was a case but all we could find in the rack and in the back were 3 bottles of the pinot and 1 of the katzenstal riesling.

BLM now does wine tastings with ridiculously big glasses. based on a quick run-through, there is a lot of interesting and probably pretty decent stuff that they can't move which is gradually going into discount territory. i also picked up a bottle of donkey and goat mcdowell syrah for $17. i noted without much surprise that almost everything on deep, deep discount had been brought in by jenny and francois.
 
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