I should say to start that I have had some fantastic bottles of Roagna that have had either no Brett at all or just a hint of funkiness which subsides/mellows with air.
However, I would say my hit rate is around 50/50 for ‘good’ bottles compared to bottles that have a bit too much Brett for my taste or are just plain Brett bombs that I think most people would find too much.
My experience is mainly with the Paje (have had multiple 2012 in particular) and the Langhe (2014 and 2015).
Having looked at a few reviews online, Brett / over- funkiness does seem to come up quite often.
Can anyone with more experience than me shed any light on how often these wines show strong Brett and whether any particular bottling or vintages are more affected than others?
I would also be interested in thoughts on how to treat Bretty bottles… will significant time/air help?
I’ve had a handful of 04/05/07 Roagna, and can’t recall any brett influenced bottles. Not sure that’s of any help with your situation… but a data point.
I personally detest brett, sorry you’re running into it with your bottles.
Hard to say which wines or vintages show more brett, but at least 2015 Dolcetto was heavily bretty and 2009 Dolcetto quite bretty. Both wonderful wines as well.
Most if not all Roagna wines I’ve tasted have been at least mildly funky, if not obviously bretty, so it’s a producer I wouldn’t recommend to people who want their wines squeaky clean.
Having had enough bretty wines that have been 50 yo or older, it seems quite obvious that brett doesn’t disappear with age. However, it might blend better with tertiary fruit flavors compared to the more vibrant youthful fruit flavors - at least I’ve noticed that in the tastings I’ve been, there are some people who might consider a young, bretty wine undrinkably funky and unpleasant, but in another tasting an old wine that feels similarly bretty to me might be described by these same people as wonderfully evolved, earthy and savory with a lovely bouquet of leather and exotic spices. So, in essence, while significant time might not make bretty notes go away, it might make the wine more palatable to people who dislike brett.
Air doesn’t help. A bretty wine will be bretty a few hours from opening, on the next day and the week after that.
I would say, in general, when a winery has wines that display brett you can assume that it’s present in the winery and all wines probably are exposed somewhat. It can be pretty tough to get rid of without a massive cellar clean up and barrel/wood fermentor replacement. So it’s likely always going to be there without a focused and dedicated program to eliminate it.
Of course some wines work beautifully (imho) with their unique cellar funk (including Brett) while others don’t. Hello Clape and Rayas.
What generally happens is that some wines/varietals/vineyards/vintages integrate a lot better with it than others, sometimes to the point it isn’t recognized. Also, depending on where the wines are aged and what they touch, they may have more or less brett from vintage to vintage.
Also check out this nugget…
“There is this false idea that there are good Brett strains and bad Brett strains,” Gordon Burns of ETS Labs tells me, explaining the regular requests he gets to isolate and disseminate some kind of mythical benevolent Brett, one that steers more toward leather and less toward latrine. “But it’s not as simple as that. The same strain of Brett will perform differently under different circumstances.” His colleague Dr. Richard DeScenzo outlines a recent study he performed, wherein a wine made from a German variety registered a 4-EP/4-EG ratio of 1:2. “We took that same strain and put it in Cabernet, and the ratio completely changed.” Additionally, they maintain that the same strain in the same wine can also vary dramatically by vintage. “Brett is impossible to control,” Burns explains. “You can have the same grapes from the same vineyard, vinified in exactly the same fashion with the same strain of Brett two years in a row, and you’ll have a distinctly different sensory outcome. This has been demonstrated time and time again.” The reason for this is that Brett’s expression depends entirely on what it had to eat, which has everything to do with what happened in the vineyard that year. In that sense, Brett’s reaction is a kind of super exaggerated look at the unseen forces that shape a vintage."
I agree with all of this + this is what I’ve been explaining to my wine acquintances for years!
The reason for this is that Brett’s expression depends entirely on what it had to eat, which has everything to do with what happened in the vineyard that year.
Not only this, but even what happened in fermentation! Two batches of the same variety, harvested from the same vineyard and fermented in two fermentors might have two very different expressions of brett - if the first fermented to 0,5 g/l RS and the other to 2,5 g/l might produce two very different batches as the second batch has so much more sugar for brett to munch than the first one. The differences might not be that obvious after the primary fermentation, but things can be mighty different after a year of aging in oak if the wines are not protected by a dose of SO2 high enough to stun brett.
I’ve had what may be brett (but it may also be reduction given the variety) in the Dolcetto but have not in the Barbaresco or Barolo including multiple bottles of the 2012 Paje mentioned above. It may be that the wines get to my cellar without ever getting to a temperature where there can be a brett bloom (IIRC, 70+ F) and that’s why I’ve never experienced it.
That’s a critical point that brett is a winery issue and not a bottle issue (generally, if I understand correctly a wine can have brett present but if it stays in a cold chain then it may never bloom).
I don’t find Rayas to be especially bretty. I wonder if the flor ingests some of the brett as it does with VA?
I think a lot of Syrah tends towards reduction that can show really similarly to brett. That being said, I can’t speak directly to Clape as I’ve never seen an analysis of a bottle of Cornas. I just want to make the point that people can easily confuse brett and reduction.
Thanks for all the data points and information. It seems I will have to live with the risk of a few Bretty bottles if I want to get to taste the ‘good’ ones…
A winemaker posted in the last week that brett can multiply at temperatures over 52F, though I recall from a thread years ago that the graph is not at all linear and it really takes off above 65F or 68F.