Just back from a 10 days trip to the US starting with a flight to NY JFK on september 11... quite a tight security at the time of boarding in Europe.
Annual trade tasting organised by our common NY wholesaler Frederick Wildman that my good friend Stephan Asseo just joined in New York. Stephan left France 7 years ago with his entire family and found l'Aventure Vineyards in Paso Robles California. He lately became the new hot winery in California with a stunning 98/100 from Robert Parker
More "September visit to the US" »
After seven years of intensive internal research for alternative methods of closure, we have decided to use "DIAM" corks of the brand Oeneo-Bouchage for an important part of our Classic range of wines of the 2006 vintage and for the whole of the 2007's. This decision comes after the successful test we carried out with this closure on 375ml size bottles in the year 2004 and on a fraction of wines of the 2005 vintage.
We have always observed – and this phenomenon is widely known in our profession as one of our main quality issue – that a fraction of the wines sealed with natural cork suffer from what is generally called "cork taint". In fact, this phenomenon seems to have become more marked in recent years, and so in 1998 we began to seriously investigate ways of overcoming the problem.
We studied and experimented with every different type of "cork" that existed on the market (agglomerated, treated, synthetic, 1 + 1 (composite), and screw-caps. For technical questions, the screw-caps is not suited to our way of working because all our wines are palletized or stored on bins, bottles unlabelled, before their labelling at times of shipping. The binning of bottles with these screw-caps closures poses potential problems of leaking on such bottles.
After countless tests conducted with great rigour by Marc Hugel as well as a recent 4 days visit of their premisses in Spain we have finally selected DIAM, manufactured by Oeneo-Bouchage.
More "At last, corks without the risk of cork taint" »
