TN: 1998 Red Burgundies and California ringer

"Mark Lipton" in news:f519jq$ehv$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org...

It's possible of course but look, that was just one bottle of one wine! I'd hesitate to extrapolate from it to the whole region, or even to Lafarge 98s. (I've had good luck with Lafarge wines in the past.)

That particular wine had unusual aromas that I found unattractive. (Favor structure was solid if unexciting.) I was trying to identify a faint smell in it -- lacking anything that fit well I wrote almost mildewey, or sour cherry -- efforts to name things with at least related olfactory footprints. Not necessarily a flaw. It may have been in a bad phase, or had bottle variation (by the way, my tasting groups seem to encounter lower rates of cork taint today than a few years ago -- that's anecdotal info of course) and finally, the wine was in pretty rich company.