2005 Vintage Assessment and Oxidation Check Dinner No. 3 @ Melisse February 27, 2013

[CFu]

@Don Cornwell

@paul hanna

Thanks Don for another interesting and insightful tasting.

Le Moine again showing yet again how disappointing their wines are. Luckily I stopped buying them after 2005, still, what a waste of several thousand dollars…

Paul:

Mounir Saouma of Le Moine wrote to me (and the others who attended the dinners) after he saw the results from the third tasting and the prior notes. He doesn’t believe what we experienced on the 2005s was oxidation and insists the 2005s are closed. If it wasn’t oxidation we were dealing with, then 24 of us, including his own US importer, the California importer of Drouhin and a winery owner were completely fooled.

In the email Mounir did explain his techniques for making white wine:

• “here we work as following: a lot of lees , both alcoholic and malo in barrel WITHOUT RACKING for 24 months , no sulfur before 18 months of aging , bottling with more than 1000 mg of CO2 (Average for others is around 400 ) and Only 15/20 mg of SO2 (norm today is 50 ) , our wines are different. They are very deep colored at bottling…”

I’ve expressed to Mounir my opinions that CO2 is not a substitute chemically for SO2, that CO2 does nothing to prevent the oxidation of ethanol or phenols once the wine is in the bottle, and that by adding no sulfites until bottling and bottling with only 15 to 20 ppm of S02 his wines are virtually guaranteed to become prematurely oxidized.

when I read the email from Mounir I thought… man some people just want to believe what they want to believe.

[paul_hanna]

@Don Cornwell

@paul hanna

Don, I am with you here.

2 bottle each of the '02, '04 and '05 Montrachet, with 5 out or the 6 bottles clearly oxidized (one '04 was ok, but just not a great wine).

Extended aeration did nothing for the wines, and I recall at least twice leaving them to look at the next day, with no improvement evident and a clearly prematurely oxidized profile.

Paul

Please add the additional bottles to the wiki site when you have a moment.

Don,

I tend not to post to the Wiki when I haven’t recorded accurate notes for the wines along with relevant dates of tastings…

Must say I found Mounir’s last email amusing and also quite disturbing.

Talk about a head in the sand crazy sort of attitude…

[paul_hanna]

@Charlie Fu

@Don Cornwell

@paul hanna

Thanks Don for another interesting and insightful tasting.

Le Moine again showing yet again how disappointing their wines are. Luckily I stopped buying them after 2005, still, what a waste of several thousand dollars…

Paul:

Mounir Saouma of Le Moine wrote to me (and the others who attended the dinners) after he saw the results from the third tasting and the prior notes. He doesn’t believe what we experienced on the 2005s was oxidation and insists the 2005s are closed. If it wasn’t oxidation we were dealing with, then 24 of us, including his own US importer, the California importer of Drouhin and a winery owner were completely fooled.

In the email Mounir did explain his techniques for making white wine:

• “here we work as following: a lot of lees , both alcoholic and malo in barrel WITHOUT RACKING for 24 months , no sulfur before 18 months of aging , bottling with more than 1000 mg of CO2 (Average for others is around 400 ) and Only 15/20 mg of SO2 (norm today is 50 ) , our wines are different. They are very deep colored at bottling…”

I’ve expressed to Mounir my opinions that CO2 is not a substitute chemically for SO2, that CO2 does nothing to prevent the oxidation of ethanol or phenols once the wine is in the bottle, and that by adding no sulfites until bottling and bottling with only 15 to 20 ppm of S02 his wines are virtually guaranteed to become prematurely oxidized.

when I read the email from Mounir I thought… man some people just want to believe what they want to believe.

Wait to you read the last reply…

[dcornutt]

Drink up!

[CFu]

Oh Lordy. This last one is great!

@paul hanna

@Don Cornwell

@paul hanna

Don, I am with you here.

2 bottle each of the '02, '04 and '05 Montrachet, with 5 out or the 6 bottles clearly oxidized (one '04 was ok, but just not a great wine).

Extended aeration did nothing for the wines, and I recall at least twice leaving them to look at the next day, with no improvement evident and a clearly prematurely oxidized profile.

Paul

Please add the additional bottles to the wiki site when you have a moment.

Don,

I tend not to post to the Wiki when I haven’t recorded accurate notes for the wines along with relevant dates of tastings…

Must say I found Mounir’s last email amusing and also quite disturbing.

Talk about a head in the sand crazy sort of attitude…

[billnanson]

Applause Don.

I may have missed it, having just got home from 1 month away, but how were the wines prepared Don? Opened how long before, serving temp - geeky things like that…

Thanks
Bill

[Don_Cornwell]

@billnanson

Applause Don.

I may have missed it, having just got home from 1 month away, but how were the wines prepared Don? Opened how long before, serving temp - geeky things like that…

Thanks
Bill

Bill:

The first flight was opened about 45 minutes before we tasted them. Serving temp was about 60 degrees (F) on the first flight. Because some bottles were brought to the restaurant the night of the dinner and at some degree of temperature variation, Brian equalized them before serving. The second and third flights were served at about 55 degrees (F). We had a very long evening with the wines.

[Chris_Seiber]

@Lewis Dawson

Thanks for the report, Don, as depressing as it is. I guess Steve Tanzer was wrong when he predicted that vintages post 2002 would see the problem in the rearview mirror… LOL.

Burgundy probably fixed it starting in 2006. Or so we can think, until the next installment of Don’s vintage assessments.

[Don_Cornwell]

As I mentioned in the thread about the Second Dinner on February 20, I had a conversation with one of the well known wine critics who suggested that since we started separately tracking oxidized and advanced wines (and reporting a total number of either oxidized or advanced wines) three years ago, we need to have a consistent basis of comparing incidence of premature aging when comparing vintages.

That conversation prompted me to go back through all of the notes for the past eight years and to re-compile the statistics in the same way we do now – separately counting the number of advanced wines and the number with actual markers of premature oxidation. I’ve now completed that analysis and it shows something pretty interesting.

1996 vintage (tasted at 10 years of age):
Corked: 2/28 (7%)
Oxidized: 5/28 (18%)
Advanced: 3/28 (11%)
Total advanced plus oxidized: 8/28 (29%)

1999 vintage:
Corked: 1 or 2 of 4 (2% to 4%)
Oxidized: 9/44 (20%) Highest percentage of oxidized wines ever
Advanced: 3/44(7%)
Total Oxidized + Advanced: 12/44 (27%)

2000 vintage (tasted at 7 and 7.5 years of age):
Corked: 1/58 (2%)
Oxidized: 9/58 (16%)
Advanced: 7/58 (12%)
Total Oxidized + Advanced: 16/58 (28%)

2001 vintage:
Corked: 0/43 (0%)
Oxidized: 4/43 (9%)
Advanced: 7/43 (16%)
Total Oxidized + Advanced: 11/43 (26%)

2002 vintage:
Corked: 3/64 (5%)
Oxidized: 5/64 (8%) or 6/64 (by my count) (9%)
Advanced: 5/64 (8%) Tied for lowest percentage of advanced wines ever
Total oxidized + advanced: 11/64 (17%)

2004 vintage:
Corked – 1/63 (2%)
Permanently Reduced- 1/63 (2%)
Oxidized–3/63 (5%) Lowest percentage of oxidized wines ever
Advanced-5/63 (8%) Tied for lowest percentage of advanced wines ever
Total Oxidized + advanced- 8/63 (13%) Lowest total percentage ever

2005 vintage:
Corked: 1/66 (2%) [Corked bottle of Raveneau MDT replaced on night one]
Oxidized: 4/65 (6%) Second lowest percentage of oxidized wines
Advanced:16/65 (25%) Highest percentage of advanced wines ever
Total Oxidized + advanced: 20/65 (31%) Highest total percentage ever

The most interesting pattern to emerge here is that while the percentages of wines oxidized and advanced have varied somewhat from one vintage to the next, the total for either oxidized or advanced wines was remarkably similar in the 1996, 1999, 2000 and 2001 vintages – all ranging from 25% to 29%. Only in the 2002 and 2004 vintages was the combined percentage of oxidized and advanced wines significantly lower.

2005, with a total percentage either oxidized or advanced of 31%, is the worst overall performance to date despite having the second lowest percentage of wines exhibiting actual oxidation.

[Peter_Chiu]

Thanks…

[Nick_Gangas]

amazing. Thanks Don.