Hi, Everybody! (I accidentally posted this to the wrong topic–reposting here!) I just opened two bottles of the same wine—it’s a wine I’ve had many times with a lot of pleasure (the 2018 Prieure de Beyzac), and the first of the two bottles was wildly off form: totally muted both in nose and palate, and a short and abrupt aftertaste. There were also nasty sulfur and smoke notes not at all typical of this wine—they went away after an hour or so, but without any improvement in the wine overall. I would normally blame the cork, but the cork was a Diam cork, making it extremely unlikely (although not absolutely impossible) that the cork was the cause of the problem. And the second bottle was as enjoyable as this wine normally is, making it unlikely that this was a “stage” that the wine is going through. Does anybody have any idea of what the cause of this sort of pattern might be? Thank you!
It could be that the duff bottle came off the bottling line first - who knows what was being bottled before? - and wasn’t checked. That’s my two pennyworth. Anyone else got a better explanation?
Very hard to say without tasting it. Your first part of the description sounds like reduction, which could blow off if not too extreme. But I am not sure what the underlying issue would have been. I’d go with Jancis’s idea of an problem at bottling. It might have been slight oxidation – you can, counter-intuitively, have both reduction and oxidation at the same time.
@Jancis, that was my first thought. Either first or last off the bottling line, or on the bottling line when something went wrong and it came to a halt. Another possibility is that it was a bottle packed on the outer edge of a pallet that got exposed to heat or light.
It could be there were several cuvees that were blended at the last minute and not properly mixed. One cuvee was a little reductive perhaps??
I agree it has to have happened at bottling.
The other idea that just popped into my head: how were they cleaning the houses etc that fed the filler bowl???
Aha! Thank you, all of you! Yes, the idea of some sort of accident in the bottling (or after bottling, as Tamlyn suggested as a possibility) that affected some bottles but not others makes sense. And the single biggest takeaway for me from these replies is that there are actually quite a few possible accidents that could have caused this! Again, THANK YOU!!
PS - The education that the four of you have given me with your replies more than makes up for the undrinkable bottle!
Glad to add to the confusion…many questions here…no answers!
That’s not entirely true–what you all gave me was a way to think about this that I didn’t have before reading your replies. And that, to me, is more valuable than a simple answer would have been.
My other thought was brett bloom. Brett might be marked by leathery and/or medicinal notes.
Sulphurous? No.You will just have to keep sacrificing yourself by drinking more bottles.
There’s a similar looking note on cellartracker. Unless this is a duplication