Shit-de-merde! This wine is all Brett, all the time. Unless you have an aversion to the flavors and aromas of actual wine, it is best to stay away. Only the most jaded fruit and floral aroma haters need apply.
Based on this one dimensional sensory profile I guessed France, and from there the Rhone.
I was half right. To find out which famed producer made such a wine, click here.
Ted
9 months ago
I too am totally put off by Brett-nasty wines. Thanks for writing about this!
I did a Chinon tasting a couple months ago and I can say the Charles Joguet is not the only Shit-de-merde coming out of Chinon. I was more disturbed to find the 90+ scores these Brett bombs got from the big boys of the wine critic world.
I have to disagree with the threshold you mention. I would say it is more like 200-300 ug/L. This is from personal experience and not from the literature but I would be surprised if it could reliably detected below 200. I’m curious where the number you used comes from.
Secondly, can you comment relating to Morgan’s thoughts about how the wines were clean in the winery? Is the theory that they bottled unfiltered and the yeast took off in the bottle? Seems like an easy fix if that’s the issue.
-end geeky rant
Josh Hermsmeyer
9 months ago
Ted,
Thanks for the comment.
Re: threshold – we’re both right. But perhaps you are right-er for most folks. You decide.
According to ETS labs:
“The sensory threshold will vary on the taster and the wine matrix, but generally a wine is described as having a Brettanomyces like character when 4-EP reaches between 300 and 600 ng/mL. 4-EG has a lower threshold, somewhere around 50 ng/mL. Contribution of both compounds to the “Brett†character depends on their absolute and relative concentrations.”
My experience is that I can detect Brett at 30 ug/L, whetherit be 4-EP, 4-EG or a combination of both. This has held true for both white and red wines. You can see the C. Hermitage I had tested had just around 50 ug/L, and the ethylphenol test isn’t something I have done as a matter of course. It’s expensive, as I’m sure you know. So I have to have a strong suspicion before I have it tested.
So if you accept that both 4-EG and 4-EP correlate with Brett, then 50 is a good number. Some folks argue that only 4-EP is truly indicative of an infection however. That hasn’t been my experience.
As to Morgan, yes, Brett is in the wines dormant in the cellar. Because they refuse to filter or use a sterliant like Velcorin by the time it gets here all bets are off.
Thanks again!
1WineDude
9 months ago
Holy frejoles! You’ve outdone yourself again! Bravo!!!
Morgan
9 months ago
I want to know what that Hermitage with a total SO2 of 13 is!
As for the question regarding bret in bottle. It is actually not that easy of a fix (ask any winemaker who has battled with bret in the winery), as bret is pretty much everywhere in the winery. Barring the prohibitively expensive tactic of completely replacing all barrels and wood products that come into contact with the wine in the cellar, it is virtually impossible to get rid of. There would be a better chance if the French would allow the use of ozone– a common and effective sanitizer of barrels used virtually everyplace else in the world. Also, if this is a dekkera strain of bret, aka. a spore emitting strain, it could be everywhere in the cellar, not just encrusted into the barrels (one if the reasons for the new cellars at Ducru-Beaucaillou in St. Julien).
I would guess that this wine may have been bottled with traces of RS in it. Also, I do not know if Josh ran free and total SO2′s, but given the wines reasonable pH, it should not have taken much to bring the final SO2 up to a molecular level to impede bret growth for a while.
As for sterile filtration. It would certainly get rid of the bret, but at what cost. Clearly this wine was flawed beyond enjoyment, however, I have enjoyed many other rich, delicious, wines from Joguet that had complexing, mild, bret-character. These would have been simpler, less satisfying wines, if forced through a .35 micron filter.
Josh Hermsmeyer
9 months ago
That C. Hermitage is for a future review. Can’t spoil it yet! :-p
Thanks for adding to the discussion (and for your kind blog post).
Ted
9 months ago
Morgan,
Oh yes, I know quite well how hard Brett is to contain once it has set up shop in the winery. I guess what is different about this situation in the wines were apparently clean (not showing 4ep/eg anyway) up to bottling. This means that the wine could have been saved by filtration.
And .35 micron is pretty excessive, .65 would do the trick for yeast. I’ve had good success at 1.2. An even better option would be DMDC but I’m not sure if it is legal in France.
For me, I prefer not to filter at all. However, if I had one nasty brett bomb develop on me like this (been lucky on unfiltered wines so far)I would start. Personally, I think the costs of bottling a “risky” wine unfiltered outweigh the benefits of a possible increase in complexity.
From many a trial my observation is that filtration makes a minimal impact on the wine. The immediate effect is very significant but given enough time most wines tend to return to “normal”. I guess this is a classic winemaker’s arguement and I would expect many people to disagree.
Hypocrisy notice: The same arguement could be said for natural corks and TCA. Yet I still use them- go figure!
Josh- these reviews kick ass, keep ‘em coming sir.
Josh
9 months ago
Thanks Ted. Big fan of all the wines you have a hand in by the way. Thanks for the kind words.
Morgan
9 months ago
Hey Ted,
Thanks for the response– good to add to the comments on such a thought-out post. First off, sorry I did not see you were a fellow winemaker, much less one whose wines I have enjoyed so often. I find it hard in making comments on any blog to balance the necessary delicious nerdery of winemaking while also making it cogent to the majority non-winemakers.
First off, I agree thst .35 microns for filtration is hard-core, and .6 will work (as many a scientific trial shows!)– but that is close to a “sterile” level (and dealing with wines where chemistry might never be looked at, this might be necessary, as I have had plenty an unfiltered wine with lactobacillus as well). I have also seen higher micron levels work where there are low populations of bret and pH conditions are also inhibitory. Also, though I prefer non-filtration (as it seems you do), I am no luddite when it comes to filtration. It, like many other supposed evils, is overhyped. I do find, though, that it has greater affect on wines with less pigmentation (much like lysozyme).
I think the problem here is that we do not know how clean the wines were. For me, they tasted clean in the winery, but I certainly was not there taking samples and running them off to ETS for scorpion analysis. The cellars are really cold, probably in the low 50′, so I can only say that they did not smell or taste bretty to me. As I wrote in my email to Josh (which he was forced to pair down since I am overly verbose, pretty much always), is that I have had this experience in a number of cellars in France. My other example was Clape (and I love Jean-Marie and Auguste), where if you have the wines in the cellar where they have never been exposed to sunlight, or any major heat variation (and the wines very slowly go through ML, in full contact with the bret infested decades-old foudres), and then taste them stateside, the difference is rather huge.
So, some clarification. Hope harvest went well and you are getting some sleep!
M