I like them but I find them a tad oaky.
For what itâs worth my best PYCM experiences have been with bottles 10-13 years old that have received a good amount of air
The 2016 BB I found mediocre, but the 2017 BB has this fresh lime note that I love. Also the new 2018 Haut Cotes BB has big ripe fruit if your tastes lean that wayâŚ
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So far for me, these are wines that are often dominated and overwhelmed by the house style. Itâs a little like Roty and their oak regimen. At the lower levels often all I get is the very reductive style. As the grapes/sites become more exalted, then the wines become strong enough to push the style aside, and can be quite impressive. bear in mind that I havenât aged anything for longer than about 5 years, and that I havenât tried extensive (eg several hours) amounts of air.
I bought copper straws specifically for his wines. I let it sit for a minute or two, swirl and remove. It seems to to lessen the sulphide character for some but not others. Iâll have to review the thread on reductive wines.
Plus a big #1. Most recently, an 08` En Remilly was in a perfect place.
My understanding was that copper straws (and mugs) usually have a coating in them to prevent copper from reacting to acidic environments and from having copper leach out and cause copper toxicity. So they wouldnât really react to the sulphur compounds in a reductive wine.
I donât imagine your copper straw would be much use unless youâve scrubbed its coating off. Even then Iâd be a bit concerned with toxic copper compounds getting into the wine youâre about to drink.
Same. For me itâs the really tropical oak which I can sometimes call blind and donât like; which has been consistent over the years. I find the 1er crus to be the most affected by the style. I found the 2017 grand crus to be surprisingly terrific at Paulee (a real surprise to me!) and the 1er cru that was poured to be barely drinkable.
I find the En Remilly to be a great âoff restaurant listâ wine as itâs usually not that expensive and because of the oak usually ready to go.
That is a glorious wine.
Rodrigo,
Youâre right. I checked the website where I bought the copper straws, and theyâre covered with food grade lacquer. The reason they might have worked intermittently is some are scratched with exposed copper and some are not.
Warren
I think this notion that they are extremely reductive is a bit of a confusion of terms, in so far that the wines have a rather smoky/nutty/toasty oak signature from Chassin and François Frères which is often mistaken for reduction, and that they often have quite high levels of free sulfites, which lend them plenty of youthful struck match (PY explained to me that he has realized that, in his new, much colder cellar, he doesnât need to add so much SO2 to get to his target level of free sulfites, so this tendency should diminish a bit from 2018 onwards), which is also confused with reduction. Now, it can indeed be very hard to break down where one characteristic ends and the other begins, but thatâs how I see it. Sure, there have been some wines in some vintages that were a bit reduced, but I struggle to think of a wine from him that I tasted recently that was reduced. And this might explain why the copper doesnât have any effect, as the characteristics that seem reduced are not, in fact, reduction.
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So William, if this is more oak than anything else, why does it often seem to âblow offâ somewhat by the next day? Or does that mean itâs the sulfites that are giving a large part of that effect (which seems to me an exaggerated form of the old Coche creosote-like notes. BTW, where did that Coche profile come from, which now seems to be somewhat gone.)?
Lots of questions in there! But I think the capacity of a bit of toasty oak to integrate with a decant or with bottle age isnât hugely controversial, even if too much faith has sometimes been put in it. Percentages of new oak are quite low these days, and the barrels are large, so there are many much oakier wines in Burgundy than these. In terms of unpacking the style, as ever, there are multiple variables, and to me the PYCM style is a combination of a certain approach to pressing (crushing, quite long cycles) with a certain approach to ĂŠlevage, which sees the wines occupy a space where gentle reduction, varietal character of Chardonnay and oak all intersect, backed up with quite chalky structure on the palate. (I think the latter three are far more important constituents than the former, and especially in vintages such as '15, '17 and '18.) There are indeed some similarities with Coche in that regard.
As for how the Coche style has evolved, RaphaĂŤl and his father began using a touch less lees and a touch less new oak in the late 2000s. People, including me, only really noticed with the 2013 vintage, and were disconcerted. But the 2013s, tasted today, are very recognizably Coche, and very good; so my analysis is that the wines are simply a bit less stylized in their youth than they used to be. Yet the fundamentals of the style are still there, just a touch dialed down, and the fingerprints are just as evident with bottle age. I defy anyone, opening a 2013 Perrières today, to say that it doesnât âtaste like Cocheâ, and so my initial disconcertion was very much assuaged. One has to be prepared to revise opinions in the wine world.
To return to PYCM, I understand that some love the style and some donât (I have friends who occupy both camps). To me, that almost misses the point as the wines are among the few made today in Burgundy with a real aspiration to age, and they have tended to realize that aspiration. Open a 2009 Perrières today, for example, and one has a great bottle. Or a 2013 Caillerets, for example. By that stage, everything tends to integrate very nicely and the wines pick up dimension and complexity that one couldnât have anticipated when they were youngâthey donât just âsurviveâ, they improve. I buy some bottles for my own cellar for this reason.
Addendum: I should really clarify, since thereâs a lot of confusion around the terms, that the winemaking style is indeed somewhat âreductiveâ, in the sense that it is obviously not oxidative (the wines mature on lots of lees, often in larger format barrels), but that I have very seldom found the wines to be actively reduced, i.e. marked by the presence of sulfides, and I know that is not something Pierre-Yves is looking to achieve.
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I think this notion that they are extremely reductive is a bit of a confusion of terms, in so far that the wines have a rather smoky/nutty/toasty oak signature from Chassin and François Frères which is often mistaken for reduction, and that they often have quite high levels of free sulfites, which lend them plenty of youthful struck match (PY explained to me that he has realized that, in his new, much colder cellar, he doesnât need to add so much SO2 to get to his target level of free sulfites, so this tendency should diminish a bit from 2018 onwards), which is also confused with reduction. Now, it can indeed be very hard to break down where one characteristic ends and the other begins, but thatâs how I see it. Sure, there have been some wines in some vintages that were a bit reduced, but I struggle to think of a wine from him that I tasted recently that was reduced. And this might explain why the copper doesnât have any effect, as the characteristics that seem reduced are not, in fact, reduction.
As someone with an undergraduate chemistry degree, but no formal oenology training, Iâm 90% sure this is incorrect; the persistence of free sulfites IS the same thing as reduction. Reduction, i.e. an oxygen-poor environment, is the very environment that allows free sulfites to exist in the first place. If the wine were more oxidative to start with, more free sulfites would be oxidized into free sulFATES, which are less pungent, and therefore we would perceive less of the characteristic reductive sulfury flavors. When wine tasters identify âreductive flavorsâ it is free sulfites that are being detected in the nose and on the palate, free sulfites that exist because of a lack of oxidation, that is to say, reduction. To sum it up, high levels of free sulfites are EQUIVALENT to high levels of reduction. Ergo, PYCM wines are reductive and smell like stinky matches!
William you are a treasure trove of information, thank you for contributing to this site.
Iâm a huge fan of the wines from PYCM, and echo Williamâs comments on aging. Try an MP from 2006, or his Batard from 2007 and you will understand how they improve with cellaring. His 15s are amazing, and for my palate in general in warm years (06, 09, 10, 12, 15, 16) he overachieves.
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+1. The BBM is the best Iâve ever had. Lots of great wines. Too bad the damn bottles are so heavy.
You lift weights - you can handle those bottles!!
Thanks William. Very informative.
What other WB producers make wines that are built for ageing?
the 750s, yes, but not the magnums!
The amount of free sulfites is largely determined by how much you add and the pH of the wine. Winemakers target a particular level of free sulfites at bottling and add accordingly. When you talk about an oxygen poor environment, you are talking about a closed bottleâand yes, itâs true that most of the interesting processes in wine maturation, in barrel and in bottle, take place in an oxygen-poor, more or less reductive environment (the popular notion of bottle aging as some sort of slow oxidation seems to be mistaken). But when we talk about wines that are actively âreducedâ, we are not talking about just adding lots of SO2, or ĂŠlevage in a reductive environment (even though these things can kick a wineâs redox chemistry in that direction), we are talking about sulfides and mercaptansâunless I have misunderstood what people mean. Jamie Goode has a good article on this subject: mercaptans and other volatile sulfur compounds in wine
And to return to the point I was originally making, I would argue that much less of the PYCM style is attributable to volatile sulfur compounds than people tend to assume! Hence why copper doesnât do much to change them.
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Big Doc only knows one speed, baby!