2004 Red Burgundy and Ladybugs

Bill Nanson and others have been suggesting the ladybug taint as the possible culprit for GM in 2004 Burgundy. My recent encounter with a stinkbug made me to think that this could be very plausible.

Yesterday I found two dead dehydrated ladybugs. Since my son wanted a science experiment, I decided to investigate the affect of ladybugs in wine. I poured 4 oz of 2009 Jean-Marc Burgaud Morgon Côte du Py Vieilles Vignes into a small container. I crushed two lady bugs and mixed into the wine and put in a refrigerator. After four hours, I thought I noticed GM. 18 hours later, there was a clear GM note. I poured it to a Reidel Burgundy Vinum and brought down to room temperature. At this point GM note is dominating the nose. The smell of the wine is exactly the same as GM in 2004.

Some wine lovers who don’t know what GM smells like assume that it is like the unripe cab franc note in a loire red but this is not true at all. It is sharper and slightly metallic. Bill has informed that the 11 may also be affected by ladybugs. If Bill is right about GM in 2011, I am certain that the ladybug is the cause of GM.

Nice experiment Kevin.
It doesn’t take much of that pyrazine that they put out to taint the wine for sure.

Gosh, I thought that was a given (lb taint).

Ontario had a terrible outbreak in '01 (and a little the following vintages in certain spots) and it is a mirror image of what '04 burgundy has turned out to be.

Thank god we have these forums and free resources like Bill’s web site. Some of the for-profit critics may have started out as consumer advocates but none of them would dare now to recommend against buying a current vintage…

Kevin,
You need to do this again with a second untainted sample as a comparison. If you can deal with the ladybug wine a another
time that is!

Was 2004 Beaujolais also affected by the GM? What about any other areas of France?

Cool experiment…

Might have to try this to replicate a really gamy CNDP…

I have to believe that 2004 is not the first vintage of Burgundy with ladybugs, esp., if that was true in 2011 as well. If prior vintages also had a lot of ladybugs, what are they? Did they have the same character as 2004?

Shouldn’t you use fresh ladybugs? Seems kind of like using oak chips.

If you had “Gentlemanbugs” there would be no stink!!

I would presume that any winery with destemming without crushing and sorting mechanisms could easily get rid of most ladybugs. It seems that any whole cluster process without sorting could keep the ladybugs in the process and hence taint. For us in the northeast its the marmorated stinkbug.

What would those destemmers do to those ladybugs?
If I was a ladybug(which I am not) and getting whacked with a destemmer, I would let out a whole round of stink right into the immediate area. You can’t sort out ladybugs with a destemmer without disturbing them. Maybe you could minimize but I am not sure you could completely exclude taint with a destemmer . The bugs don’t have to be crushed to cause a taint. FWIW.

An interesting discussion but it doesn’t explain one thing …

why are the white wines brilliant in 2004 with no trace of green stemmy notes?

Does Chardonnay mask this easily? Destemming? Do ladybugs love pinot noir as most people do?
I doubt they were able to exclude every single bug with a destemmer.
Inquiring minds want to know.

Seems that the lowest yield red wines were the most affected too. Pretty equal distribution amongst those that destem and those who use whole cluster for taint.

Don,
Chardonnay is pressed off of the skins while Pinot macerates on them during fermentation. I think this means less of the GM compound makes it into the Chardonnay must. FWIW, I have found many '04 whites do show GMs but it is less common and lower level compared to the reds.

Excuse moi , but what is GM. I understand it is not General Motors.

Wine is plenty but not dead ladybugs.

I would think that the fresh ones would cause even greater damage without getting into nasty detail.

In this case, it’s Green Meanies.

Don,
There are a lot of whites with the same issue, e.g. Fevres.

This is a good question. Species migration - plant, animal; vertebrate, invertebrate - is fairly wide-spread these days and forms one kind of evidence that long-term temperature patterns are changing (though Don would presumably dispute this point). A notable recent example of such migration in insects is the northward migration of the gypsy moth, which is playing merry hell with the Appalachian hemlock population. In Colorado, longer summers are enabling beetles to breed more successfully and be more aggressive in assaulting regional pines, creating large, prominent patches of devastated forest.

So one possibility is that the long, warm, dry summer of 2003 allowed ladybugs to lay an unusually large number of viable eggs, causing a correspondingly large population of ladybugs in 2004. Note, I suggest this cause solely as a plausible conjecture, I’m not offering actual evidence or careful analysis, because I haven’t studied the events closely.

If this explanation were to hold water, and weather in 2009-2010 promoted a similarly large population in 2011 (which, per Nanson, may also have a prominent GM signature), Burg lovers have to consider weather this problem will become a frequent one, and growers will have to develop measures to reduce the annual ladybug population.

GM = green meanies, or some variation thereof, that is, unpleasant green flavor in the wine.