Slow Drip Wins Again
SENSORY NOTES: “Tannat needs several years to soften and open, yet here we are, just 23 months after vintage, bottling a highly drinkable wine with round, voluptuous mouthfeel. The nose is instantly alluring. These generous and approachable tannins support intriguing aromas of tar, violets and sweet fennel.”
VARIETALS: Not specified
BARRELS: Neutral French oak aged 23 months
PAIRS WITH: Grilled duck breast
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Micro-oxygenation.
Patrick Ducournau invented it in the early 1990s to solve a very specific problem: Tannat tannins are so aggressive they’ll sandpaper your gums off, and the wine needed oxygen but couldn’t have it all at once. So Ducournau figured out how to feed the wine tiny, controlled bubbles — not a gulp, not a gasp, just a slow, steady trickle — and the tannins calmed right down. The technique is now used in wineries around the world and has its own professional literature, consultants, and equipment manufacturers. From one Gascon winemaker’s hunch to a global industry standard in about thirty years. Not bad.
The tasting note compares it to conching chocolate, which is the thing that happens when you run liquid cocoa through a machine for anywhere from a few hours to several days, folding and aerating it until the bitter volatile acids drive off and the texture goes silky. Rodolphe Lindt figured this out in 1879 — allegedly by accident, leaving his machine running over a weekend — and the result was the first “melting chocolate,” which is more or less every chocolate bar you have ever enjoyed. The Aztec connection in the note is interesting: they did process cacao, though their version leaned savory, spiced, and sometimes fermented, which sounds either disgusting or incredible depending on your relationship with chili. But the underlying insight — that time and air transform something harsh into something luxurious — is the same one Ducournau had six hundred years later, staring at an undrinkable barrel of Tannat in southwest France.
There is apparently a whole category of discoveries that work this way: the problem is too much, the solution is very little, slowly. Bread. Cheese. Whiskey. Vinegar. Sourdough is just flour and water that you’ve let breathe long enough to become something else entirely. Ducournau’s micro-oxygenation fits neatly into this long, quiet tradition of humans learning that patience plus a controlled trickle of something beats brute force almost every time.
ICYMI, you have two choices:
- Worried Summer heat might get to your wine before your wine gets to you? Order from the sale linked here, and we’ll get it to you at a cooler time of year!
- Want it shipped now? Every package during the summer will have protected temp control ground shipping for much of the country that takes longer but will ensure safe delivery. Expect up to two weeks for delivery. Now through the September 12th offer.
