Bill,
Not to get argumentative, but heck, why not . . . .
So decanting should only be used with older wines or wines that may have sediment? Never to aerate?
Ducking . . .
Did Kristi Melton leave Clos du Val?? Acc to the winery’s website (not always accurate) she is part of the renaissance going on there. I like her and thinks she is a smart cookie…not that i always agree with her.
About decanting: many people open and decant wine a long time in advance, not just for sedimental reasons, but because they believe the wine breathes and opens up.
I did an experiment on this one time:
3 bottles each of 8 different wines, opened and decanted at different times. Then poured back into the bottle and tasted blind.
5 times out of 8 the most recently opened bottles—including the Barolo-- were preferred. In no case was the bottle opened the day before preferred.
Yet we read that breathing softens tannins etc…no proof of this exists.
Mel,
How long had they be decanted for? How old were the wines? What varieties?
I do believe, and have seen, that air DOES help young wines - and that they do ‘develop’ differently than just opening the bottle and pouring them out. But not in every case.
YMMV would be the key here, eh?
Cheers.
I was in retail during the '70s. Somebody wrote an article in New York Magazine about the notion of ‘breathing’ for wine being bogus. Alex Bespaloff??
So we tested this theory almost 40 years ago and i hope you will forgive me if I do not remember the wines.
I bring this story up once a year but nobody ever repeats the experiment.
At the time I thought the reductive/funky wines would gain from breathiong. D Corti always said to open up Barolo a day in advance and leave it by the radiator…that’s when Barolo was the capitol of VA.
So what were your conclusions, Mel?
They would increase or improve/dissipate?
I thought the funkier wines would improve with breathing.
And did they? Don’t keep us in suspense!
The answers to all of your questions, Larry, as well as some that you have not yet thought of, will be found in the decanting thread…
Bill - If you want people to read that one, you need to write bullet points, not dump thousands of words from different articles with no clear breaks. Concision, man, concision!
Not quite ready to take one for the team and taste the most recent vintage - more about that below - but 95 points for a newly released Clos Du Val Napa Cab? I don’t think so. Someone switched the bottles on the reviewer. After that, a bit of “piling on” to sell wine, perhaps? I started regularly buying and drinking the Napa CDV cabs every year starting with the 2002 vintage. I am a huge fan. This is, for me, a staple in my cellar. I love these wines but I don’t recall every giving one 95 points (and I am pretty easy to please).
Over the years, I have had a few of them at release and/or young. In my experience, they are all pretty much the same. Notes from the 2010 seem to sum up my general impression of these wines at release. “Little nose and giving up little fruit or character. Hard, thin, acidic with a harsh, tannic finish.” If I did not know what they turn into with 7-10 years of bottle age (passive cellar, so I don’t dare go longer) I would have spit it out and moved on without looking back. That said, I (think I) know better so I bought 4 bottles to consume starting in 2017 or so.
At 7-8 years of age, the “House style” for the CDV Napa cabs from the 2002 through the 2007 vintages has been consistent for me. Vintages from 2008-2012 are still resting undisturbed. Up to this point, every one of these, with a couple of hours in the decanter,* has a light, perfumed nose of black fruit, a bit of barnyard and a distinct character of French oak. They are elegant, smooth and balanced with good fruit and some complexity with a nice finish. I appreciate that the flavor profile is the same from year to year. The only real variations that I find are variations in depth and intensity due more, I imagine, to variations in vintage as opposed to changes in winemaking style. For me, always an excellent QPR for between $25.00 and $30.00. Always seems to go on sale at some point.
To the point of this thread. I have not tasted the 2013 CDV Napa Cab, but I am quite certain that the wine that is being described here is NOT a 2013 CDV Napa Cab. What is described is not their house style, which has not changed in years. I have not seen anything like what is described above in a 2 year old CDV, even from some of the bigger and/or highly rated vintages of recent years. Early on, they have always been thin and tannic with little fruit in the nose or mouth. Never anything that I would consider drinking young, or recommending that anyone else do so. Nothing like what is being described. Certainly not 95 points.
*As the topic of decanting has been raised… My experience with the CDV Napa Cabs is this. I always decant and only taste them after opening for serious flaws. They are typically slightly to tightly closed, a bit thin and never in a place where I would enjoy them directly. They only seem to come into their own (for me) after about 2 hours in the decanter. From there, they continue to improve for another hour or more while being consumed. By changed, I mean to say that by then the nose has opened, become more complex and often takes on a “perfumed” quality. In the mouth they become rounder, smoother and fuller. Tannins often begin to assert themselves at 3+ hours. I am not such a fan of tannin, so I tend to make sure that they are gone before that becomes to pronounced. Can’t say that I understand the mechanism for this change. I truly don’t care how or why it happens - I just know that it does for me. As was mentioned up-thread… YMMV.
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The funky wines did not get better with aeration. I did e xpect the Barolo to be the one wine that would disprove Bespaloff’s assertion but it did not…Maybe it was not funky enough!
By the way, Christi Melton is indeed gone from CDV. Tony Biaggi will do some consulting, I hear. For many years CDV made all their cab/merlot wines with 20% new oak.
Mel, sounds to me like you needed to do the experiment a few dozen times until you got it right. A lot has changed since the 70s. Bespaloff left us nearly a decade ago. This is the dawning of the age of the Coravin… 
John, I don’t write for the ADD generation, and managed to deliver enough content in that dog’s breakfast of a thread starter to spark discussion and educate a few people. One cannot expect a better result in an Internet chat room, methinks. I will give you concision when I start charging for it, as was always the case with my legal clients back in the day…
Bill,
You are free to duplicate this experiment with your friends. Just because Bespaloff died does not mean he was wrong. I thought he was wrong so I tested his position and found that he was more right than wrong.
Coravin is designed to limit oxidation in wine. People are decanting wine in order to expose it to oxygen, not to protect it.
Lots of things have changed in the wonderful world of wine since I left retail. Most of them have been done in order to make wine more approachable sooner. Wine is less tannic, less reductive, etc.
The goal has been to make restaurant ready wines, not to make wines that need to be decanted a day in advance.
I trust you were more concise when you were charging.
I’m at least a generation older than the ADD generation. I just don’t have the time to figure out what the point is, or what’s a quote and what’s from you. Make it a bit easier on us, your loyal followers – edit yourself!
Jeez, the snark here is toxic. I was a fan of the 1978 Clos du Val Zinfandel when I first discovered wine but I haven’t bought any wine from this producer in ages. Galloni may well be screwing up but I nonetheless have more respect for him than I do for what’s published by his former employer. In general (and I don’t buy Monprivato so I can’t comment) I find his take on Italian wines trustworthy. My other go to no one here gives a fig about is Charlie Olken and his colleagues at Connoisseurs Guide to California Wines. Many years of excellent tasting notes later (IMO) it occurred to me that the journal’s moniker was, and continues to be an unfortunate one. It’s kind of like “gourmet” which has me running in the opposite direction.
Does the name Wilfred Wong mean anything to you?
When I stood in the aisles of Bevmo and saw a bottle that Wilfred Wong had given 88 points, I understood I was looking at the result of a shoe someone had boiled in ether.
Said indication of quote vs. my content was done a while back. The problem to my mind is that the quoted article is long and rambles all over the place, but it does cover a lot of important points. You should find my content reasonably pithy and to the point. Feel free to ignore the rest! Let me see if I can create a Klapp’s Notes version for you…
Mel, you apparently have not read my post on the other thread, and I am not going to repeat what was said there here, since the topic of this thread is a Clos du Val wine, or rather. WHICH Clos du Val wine received 95 points from Galloni, and whom, if not Galloni, knows the answer with certainty. On the other hand, it is the result of continual and ongoing aeration experimentation over many years, not the result of a one-off experiment almost 40-50 years ago, and it has nothing to do with leaving wines open overnight as a matter of course. The decanting discussion is best left to that thread. It migrated here only due to Mr. York’s impotent snark above. Finally, Coravin has nothing to do with any decanting discussion. It was a joke. Thus, the smiley face. Peace!