Community Tasting Note

• bjwca Likes this wine: 92 points

  March 30, 2019 - Since my previous bottle was flawed, I decided not to wait too much longer on this last bottle. Luckily, it was not one of the bad Maderized bottles, but instead a perfectly aged Bordeaux.
  This makes me wonder if the winery or wine maker knows what could have caused some of the 2005 bottles to be maderized and other 2005 bottles to be perfect. Since Robert Parker and I had the exact same experience.

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3 Comments

• hiker_guy commented:

  3/30/19, 8:57 PM - Cork seal issue I'd guess

• bjwca commented:

  3/31/19, 11:34 AM - I've experienced lots of "corked" bottles that had a musty smell or oxidized characteristics to them, but my previous bottle of this 2005 Bellevue was very different, it had a port or madeira like taste to it, almost like it was fortified. I read that this can happen when the wine is overheated. Since multiple people experienced the same anomaly, where some bottles have it and other bottles do not, suggests to me that something happened at the winery or in transport to a large number of bottles. Perhaps pallets of this wine were exposed to heat, such that the outer bottles on each pallet were overheated, but the inner bottles were not.

• hiker_guy commented:

  4/3/19, 8:42 PM - Your explanation may be better. I was thinking that a % of the corks may have been damaged at bottling - this sometimes happens with mechanical corking machines - leaving a path for oxygen to get in faster and spoil the wine.
  Heat also makes sense.

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