I was alarmed to hear reports from trusted tasters that two bottles of the 2002 Sylphs had failed to deliver the expected pleasure. The wine is rather extreme at its best, and often seems to walk right up the line of volatile acidity transgression. It was bottled unfiltered since it had spent three years in barrel without sulfur–I figured that this was more than adequate time for the wine to reach a biological stability that would keep it from catastrophe in bottle. But one must always be vigilant, especially when it is hard to explain why a certain bottle seemed much less attractive than a former one.

So I organized a tasting to review the 2002 Sylphs in the context of 2 other Chardonnays of mine and one ringer. One of the questions was whether the unfiltered wine was declining in bottle; the other main question was whether the wine was so extreme even when it was sound that small differences in serving or storage conditions could make the wine unpleasant. In order to get the best sense of this, we tasted all of the wines blind and did not discuss our sensations until we had each assessed all of the wines carefully and in different sequences.

The 3 wines made by me had all been stored for more than a year in my guest bedroom, which until May 1 2006 was utterly without climate controls. The room would routinely go up to 90 odd degrees in late summer. This would test the effect of deleterious storage conditions.

I pulled two bottles of the Sylphs and one each of 2000 Scholium Project Les Tenebres and 2002 Maldonado Los Olivos. The ringer had been stored in the same room since July 2005. I thought that the rotten storage conditions would be far worse than any others that consumers had subjected the wine to …and so I felt comfortable with the notion that I could extrapolate from the condition of this bottle to almost all other bottles in circulation.

I invited 4 friends to join the tasting, and to stay for dinner afterwards. I could not imagine opening these bottles without (eventually) sharing them with friends, over food. One guest was a Burgundy expert with a with a wide professional knowledge of California wines, two were California wine experts, the fourth an inexperienced but enthusiastic taster who would give the civilian's reactions to the wines. My consolidated notes on the state and relative quality of the wines follow:

In general, it was very easy for all of us to pick out the ringer. It was much less floral and extravagant on the nose, and had a high degree of minerality, without much fatness, in the mouth. It was very difficult to tell the other wines apart—nobody identified them correctly, not even the winemaker.

brilliant and golden. Very high nose with all of the indications of barrel fermentation. Some caramelly notes of new oak. Orange blossom, marzipan, pie crust, some wet slate. In the mouth, very rich, well balanced, with good acidity and a long, fine finish. The wine was very well balanced and without any flaws, but was the least striking and consequently the group's least favorite among the California wines.

2002 SYLPHS:

brilliant, unctuous, bright gold. Same degree of oxidation as the 2000. Much thicker and denser in appearance. Extravagantly flamboyant nose strongly redolent of new oak in a mature wine. The nose was not caramelly or vanilla, but very elevated and piercing– with the same ability to take over a room as a fresh-baked pie. It had some of the characteristics of apple pie in fact: baked pie dough, butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, roast apples. The wine is not buttery however: there is too much brown spice and acid in the nose. It is more like a butter-based savory sauce. The nose also has a striking fresh-sliced mango character, with some of the sharpness of the fresh fruit. This is no doubt the VA component. It is not dominant, but is still a fundamental part of the nose. None of the wines had a VA component that one would notice as VA, certainly nothing vinegary, not even sherry-like. Some aldehydic notes in the nose, mostly caught up in the apple-pie complex. The nose also had a salty, sea-side mineral component.

In the mouth, the wine was nearly equally flamboyant. It had a very focused but short attack of fruit–but not exactly fresh fruit. Roast pineapple, dried mango, preserved lemon rind. The middle was very strong and long, dominated by dark flavors: brown spices, browned pastry dough, dried porcinis. An acid spine supported the very rich flavors and kept the wine light in the mouth. The acid led into the long, complex finish: all very smooth acid and mineral wound up in each other. Probably the longest finish of all of the wines. This was the second favorite wine of each participant.

unctuous, rich gold, less clear than the others–somewhat like a gel or suspension. A nose very similar to the Sylphs but much more restrained and elegant. Less dominated by new oak, less of an apple-pie sense, much more of a mineral and acid sense–as if you could smell the finish as a dominant component in the nose of the wine. On the whole, the same set of aromas as the Sylphs, but in a different order and proportion. Nonetheless, the elegance of its nose gave it more in common with the Les Tenebres and the Niellon than the Sylphs. Two of the tasters correctly identified it as coming from the same vineyard as the Les Tenebres on the basis of this similarity. This wine changed the most in the course of the tasting; it seemed to be reduced and oxidized at once. The oxidation did not increase over the course of a couple of hours, but the reduced nature exhibited itself a kind of coiled complexity that unwound as the wine was exposed to air.

In the mouth, the wine was very rich, oily, with a nearly sensible sweetness–but exquisitely balanced from the beginning with excellent acid. The middle of the wine was as rich and brown as the Sylphs, but this wine had minerality right from the middle. For all its smoothness, the wine was so complex in the mouth that it seemed more like solid food than a beverage; the minerality was so sensible that it had a tactile quality. On the whole, a smaller scaled wine than the Sylphs, but better balanced and, because of its more striking minerality, closer to what one might think of as the ideals of Burgundy.

This wine was the favorite of all of the tasters but one.

brilliant and golden, but somewhat thinner and more lemony in appearance than the others; similar signs of oxidation.

The nose was unattractive from the beginning: the wine had the mustiness of rotting, matted leaves. This did not dominate the nose, and it was possible to sense many other characteristics, but the mustiness took away from the pleasure of the wine. It seemed to me to be a sign of unsound fruit and not the result of any kind of bottle-spoilage. I have never seen this kind of aroma come from barrels, despite the vulgar diagnosis of “dirty barrels.” It is the second bottle of 2002 Niellon in which I have noticed this flaw. Beyond the mustiness, the wine had a pronounced minerality, the aromas of barrel fermentation, autolysis, and preserved lemon rind. The nose was dark and serious rather than floral or fruity. If it had not been for the rotten leaves, it would have been excellent.

In the mouth, the mustiness disappeared completely. The wine was weighty and complex, less rich and oily than the California wines, but still unctuous, dense, rich. Very reduced and mineral, with a tactile minerality similar to the Maldonado, but accompanied by flavors more like lemon and sorrel. The finish was long and complex with less pronounced acidity than the California 2002s; more like the Les Tenebres. This wine was the favorite of one of the tasters but was last or second to last for the others because of the mustiness.

We answered the two main questions with clarity and certainty: the typical bottle of Sylphs is not declining, and is not so extreme that it becomes unpleasant after difficult storage–in fact, it is more flamboyant than the 2002 Maldonado, but not more extreme or closer to spoilage.