In which I do battle with Premox

originally posted by Marc D:
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
originally posted by lars makie:
First they came for the whites. Now they're coming for the reds. What's next?
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Ros, of course.

And then -- sherry!!!
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Better stay the hell away from the Jura, those f*ckers.
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You can say fuckers here, Marc. I do it all the time.
 
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Marc D:
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
originally posted by lars makie:
First they came for the whites. Now they're coming for the reds. What's next?
Click to expand...
Ros, of course.

And then -- sherry!!!
Click to expand...
Better stay the hell away from the Jura, those f*ckers.
Click to expand...

You can say fuckers here, Marc. I do it all the time.
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So imperialistic of you to suppose that the "*" represented a "u."

But then, science types are foreign to the ways and means of language.

Facker.
 
originally posted by .sasha:
Man, thank you thank you for this report.
Nothing too shocking given my experience although I thought Leflaive would have done better even in the premox scapegoat vintage, 1996.
But there is another piece to this equation, one which a blind tasting makes a little difficult to consider. On a number of occasions I'd have white burgs which seemed perfectly fine but which were ahead of where they should have been at the time, thus reducing the ultimate potential. This was often the case a year or two ago with 99s and 00s, for example.
A glass of chardonnay over the holidays perhaps, when Joe is back? :-)
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A couple of people who had '96 Leflaive Pucelles on their respective lists said that it generally shows better than it did in this instance.

The whole development vs. oxidation and non-prejudiced vs. knowledge of the vintage debates were very much expressed at the actual tasting, and perhaps were not ever really resolved completely. Grades have to be taken with a grain of salt.
 
For whatever such remarks may be worth, the 1996 Leflaive PM village was a weird bird a few weeks ago. Not oxidized, but not delicious, either. Hovering in thick undecidedness.

As for grades... I may be too much of a Manichean perfectionist. Thus my appropriately uneasy question earlier.
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
...Bottles have been sourced from numberous cellars in pot-luck fashion. One bottle of each wine is present and tasted, with two exceptions...different tasters had a individual thresholds for what they would consider oxidized and what they would consider developed maturity...The bottles were served in a way that the vintage of the specific wine was not revealed until after the scores had been given.

Here are my own personal notes...
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I second all of Mark Lipton's comments, based on how the tasting was structured. Nonetheless, the results are interesting and suggestive.

If your notes are a general indication, the 96s clearly did worse. Given that they are by far the oldest wines, how premature is their oxidation? On one hand maybe it wasn't as long-lived a vintage as expected. On the other, plenty of German/Alsatian Rieslings, red Burgundies and Loire Chenin seem to be in a vigorous middle-age right now.

What about 2002s that get a "C" - are they as oxidized as the 96s, 99s and 00s rated "C" (and is that premature)? Or are they as "oxidized as they should be", making allowances for the differing ages of the wines?
 
I think it would also be worth noting that this was basically a pop and pour and spit environment. There was no decanting, and no sitting with a wine for a few hours to see how it develops.
 
Basically a grade of C is not based on development but on the level of oxidation, as much as that can be read. So a '96 C would have the same level or premature oxidation as an '02 C. Give or take.
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
The whole development vs. oxidation and non-prejudiced vs. knowledge of the vintage debates were very much expressed at the actual tasting, and perhaps were not ever really resolved completely. Grades have to be taken with a grain of salt.
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by the way, I was not necessarily trying to separate development from oxidation, they may very well be one and the same, it's just a question of when you happen to catch a wine with respect to its ( quite possibly non-linear ) premox curve
 
originally posted by .sasha:
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
The whole development vs. oxidation and non-prejudiced vs. knowledge of the vintage debates were very much expressed at the actual tasting, and perhaps were not ever really resolved completely. Grades have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Click to expand...

by the way, I was not necessarily trying to separate development from oxidation, they may very well be one and the same, it's just a question of when you happen to catch a wine with respect to its ( quite possibly non-linear ) premox curve
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I understand your point completely. I actually myself think that there is a difference between oxidation and development. Oxidation by itself is oxidation. Oxidation welded inside a greater whole is development. This is a very fine line, and hard to demarcate. But I think there is a difference.

But I get what you are saying about shortened life expectancy, etc.
 
originally posted by .sasha:
( quite possibly non-linear ) premox curve
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I think that this is the key. Except that I would say for development, premature and normal both.

Why would it be linear? Why wouldn't there be at least one inflection point?

The premature-oxidation thing is wildly mis-diagnosed. I think there are a lot of heat damaged wines out there that get tagged as "pre-moxed". I also think that folks are using a lot less sulfur without doing the other work necessary to produce long-lived wines.

Personally, I love sulfur. I like the buzz.
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
Same retail source. Some wax top. Hard to say if it was from the same case.
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A certain producer in Burgundy proudly told me that he was now saving his customers from the problem by using wax capsules for all his wines. I then told him that Dauvissat, who uses wax in France, was one of the worst-affected producers.
 
A wax top suggests a gray market bottle (mine--from the US importers--have foil capsules). Perhaps such bottles weren't handled well.
 
originally posted by Steve Lanum:
A wax top suggests a gray market bottle (mine--from the US importers--have foil capsules). Perhaps such bottles weren't handled well.
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Steve -- I don't understand your reasoning, unless you assume that gray marketeers systematically handle wines less carefully than designated importers. If that is your assumption, I think most observers would say that the situation varies -- some gray market wines have been handled better than the same wines through designated importers, some worse.
 
originally posted by Jay Miller:
2000 Dauvissat "Forets" F-
with the terrible showing of the '00 Forets a second bottle is procured of the same, and it scores in the C+ range
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Same source for the second bottle?
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I've got a bottle of this in the queue. Mine was purchased in NC on release and stored by me since. It was brought in by Danny Haas.
 
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