Thanks for the responses. I just signed up on cellartracker!
If we are right, it seems like this should be a huge hint.
That’s interesting! I have so little experience with Rhone whites, I’m only familiar with the dumb phase in red wines
This is why burg drinkers, when encountering another burg drinker, constantly ask, “what have you drunk lately? How was it showing?”
Totally disagree.
While I think the concept of a dumb phase is real, the term sometimes seems to be applied as Nate suggests – as an excuse for a mediocre wine. That’s where some knowledge of the specific wine or its type, and the vintage, is essential.
I love this thread as this is a question I’ve also pondered at times. I don’t have any answers. My only idea is to do what was suggested above and listen to the collective wisdom of CT (I’m an optimist) / people who seem to be knowledgeable of the wine or whose palates you trust. If I was thinking of pulling a bottle and a couple strangers on CT, or a couple of the experts on this board, talked of a dumb phase and/or gave the wine a below average score, I’d have second thoughts about pulling it.
There is a definite correlation.
+1
When I got into this racket about 7 years ago, my local wine place said that the best way to understand the dumb phase was to buy Chateauneufs – they drank well on release, went to sleep for a while, and generally started drinking well again seven-ish years later. (Is this still true? Was it ever true?) The 2010s were just being released then, so I drank a couple (they were great!) and buried the rest. I have always aimed to start on my remaining 2010s in 2020, and the tasting notes suggest they’re indeed starting to wake up again.
I second Maureen. There’s a well-established dumb phase for a lot of wines. Hell–there’s a dumb phase for Chablis. Understanding this, and learning how to deal with this, is integral to enjoying fine wines from a number of different regions. If you are not aware, and don’t communicate, you may miss out on enjoying many of these wines at an appropriate time (eg, how many folks drank up their 99 red burgs well before their time?)
Explaining why this phase occurs, which was the OP’s question, is more difficult. I don’t have an answer.
Explaining it is what is hard, and also why Nate’s post wasn’t entirely wrong. A lot of people assert with confidence that this or that is happening, but that doesn’t mean they’re correct in their assessments, or that they have a clue. Some wines apparently do go through some kind of “dumb” phase, but I think the reasons are likely to vary for each specific wine. And I don’t think you can really say with confidence that a particular wine will enter it at such and such date and exit at some other fixed date. At least I’ve never heard a single wine maker make predictions with that kind of confidence. It’s the wine drinkers that have the confidence to make those predictions.
The OP may gather a lot of information from this thread, but I think his question was best answered by Todd.
Someone once quoted Gaston Huet, the great Vouvray wine producer, saying that you should wait 17 years for his wines to come around. That stuck with me due to its specificity.
Indeed, I quoted that person quoting Huet in a thread three years ago on this very topic. That discussion also contained this memorable comment on the same questions posed by the OP here:
One also wonders how many bottles on retail shelves are in a dumb phase but (and) get consumed within a few days by unsuspecting consumers who then conclude that it’s a terrible wine.
thanks for the heads up on that post. some helpful information there and a great quote!
When it happens and why it happens is as much a mystery to me as to everyone else. But I have a pretty good idea of what I think it is. At some point in aging, the baby fat fruit recedes and what you are left with, for the moment at least, is tannin and acid. After some years, the fruit comes back out in an evolved way and, one hopes, the tannins have softened. Even if you know a wine well, though, it’s almost impossible for me at least to predict when it will happen.
I agree that looking at CellarTracker is an excellent idea. Dumb phases vary by region, grape variety, vineyard, winery and vintage (and probably a few other things). Do note that as Rory indicates there a lot of people posting notes who cannot tell the difference between a dumb phase and over the hill (very hard to do sometimes and it takes experience, history with the wines from the estate, etc.). If you see a combination of posts some of which indicate the wine is too young and others that the wine is over the hill, you may have found a wine in a dumb stage.
I agree that dumb phases are real based on experience having tasted a wine that seems over the hill and then five years later is really good. Two great examples were a 1988 Bruno Clair Vosne Romanee (where I was totally fooled) and a 2002 D’Angerville Volnay Premier Cru (where others thought the wine was over the hill and I thought it was too young - I was eventually proven right). The best way for me to tell frankly is experience with the winery. If I know a winery has a track record for wines aging well, and I taste a wine from them at 5-10 years old or so showing nothing (not just primary, but showing nothing) and the wine does not look old (no browning, etc.), I assume the wine is in a dumb stage.
I think I emerged from my dumb phase when I retired.
This is the best answer I’ve seen yet in terms of trying to identify when a wine I’m drinking is in a dumb stage. For a wine I don’t know well, using TNs from here and known palates on CellarTracker before opening a bottle is the best way to avoid this predicament. But not 100% reliable as different storage conditions can have an effect as well.
As to the why and how of what’s happening, I agree with Todd: it’s a mystery.
Quote: “When is a particular wine at its “best”? This is a question that is often posed, and one that is almost impossible to answer. Why? Because wine is a living, evolving entity, and like we humans, it does not have one particular moment in its life at which it is “optimal.” It goes through many stages, some good and some less so, which is what makes wine—and the human race—so intriguing!”