Understanding the dumb phase and aging

I am trying to better understand the dumb phase and wondering if anyone has some insight.

  1. How do you estimate when the dumb phase will happen and for how long? Are there things you are looking for in the aroma or palette? Do you have any techniques used to help estimate?

  2. What causes the dumb phase? Since there are multiple chemical processes happening while a wine is aging, is the dumb phase just the low period between peaks for the different individual processes?

Thanks in advance.

Joseph,

Creating an account at www.cellartracker.com is the best way I’ve found to try to navigate “dumb phases” in wines. You have access to the largest database of wine tasting notes for free. Once you take the time to enter your wines into the account then you can easily see what others are saying about your wine.

We just uncorked a domestic Cab built for aging, 2014 vintage. Decanted it six hours and it showed very strangely: subdued and almost absent nose, minimal fruit, lovely texture with silky tannins.

Mildly corked, overdecanted, dumb phase?

It’s a mystery.

Hi Joseph, I’ve not found a clear and consistent way to predict it other than experience. It tends to happen most with thin skinned varieties like Pinot Noir and Nebbiolo, and with more traditional producers rather than those described as modernist, but again these are generalizations. Kirk’s suggestion of using Cellartracker is my best tool as well. Some folks don’t know what a dumb phase is so they leave a bad note on a wine, but you can still use it as a data point.

As for #2, I agree with what you said, I perceive it as the point when the fruit has faded but the tannin/acid structure hasn’t yet, and it takes time for the elements to come back into balance. This happens often with Nebbiolo.

This is a big can of worms and not sure if anyone can give a single, complete answer. Even experience itself is no guide as wines are constantly changing and individual but sometimes you get better estimating when a wine might be closed based on experience with that wine.

+1

+1

At least prior to all the changes in winemaking in Bordeaux, it, too, was known for dumb phases.

All plausible explanations!

I think it’s essentially a trash-can term. It could mean that the wine is very reductive, that the individual bottle was bad, or that the wine was never any good to begin with. No way to know, though looking at others’ notes (as mentioned above) can give some clues. Part of the mystery of wine.

And that’s one of the things that makes wine so ‘intimidating’ to so many . . .

Cheers.

Or none of those and it’s perfectly normal for its type, which often goes through an extended dumb period between youth and mature glory.

Are Rousanne and Marsanne thin skinned also? Aren’t white Rhône’s the poster child of dumb phase?

I don’t have much experience with aged rousanne and marsanne, but Condrieu (viognier) is famous for going into a long dumb phase after a few fruity early years, then blossoming at 15-20 years.

In my experience, most men emerge from their dumb phase at around age 25.

Some, like a fine Classified Growth, require even more maturation. Owlman, for example. He’s like a 1961 Latour, still a baby. And priced like one, too.

[cheers.gif] That sounds like it deserves its own debate in a separate thread in The Asylum.

Stop.

Quit worrying about it. Vanquish the thought of it from your mind.

Bury your ageworthy wines in the back of the cellar, forget about them, and never perform a cellar inventory.

Do not open an ageworthy white until 30 years post-harvest, nor an ageworthy red until 50 years post-harvest [and those estimates could still amount to infanticide for the bulk of great ageworthy wines].

If you don’t have that many decades left on this earth, then get busy making kids [or luring the kids into making grandkids] so that you’ll have some bloodlines which can inherit the bottles that you didn’t live to open.

Aging wine is a family bidness which is conducted over timelines on the order of a century or more.

Do men REALLY emerge from dumb phase?

No they are not - and yes, they are poster children for the ‘dumb’ phase . . .