4 frontier estates poured 40 glasses. 8 tasters went through them one pour at a time and marked 754 points where the wine failed.
Every estate broke differently. Sol got marked for balance and acidity, Fauve for polish, Grès for how a glass behaves once it opens up, Marnay Sec for the sheer volume of the marks.
This follows last week's study, where 4 estates ran against 10 flights and 9 tasters judged them blind. That round found the spec picks the winner: Bertaud 5.6 Sol won 82% of its open-flight matchups, Cellier Fauve 5 led on tight specs, and Sol finished last. This round asks a narrower question: pour by pour, where does each estate break?
The method was simple. Each taster marked anything they read as a fault, tagged it with one of 8 labels (balance, acidity and structure, polish and consistency, aroma definition, originality, colour and clarity, bead and mousse, cues and length, varietal fit and tone), and rated it minor, major, or a blocker. 5 flights, 4 estates, 40 pours, 754 marked fault points.
2 tags lead for everyone. Balance, acidity and structure is the most marked tag in the study, polish and consistency is second, and that order holds for 3 out of the 4 estates. The estates separate on what comes after.
More than half of Sol's faults are about balance and acidity.
Sol drew fewer fault points than any other estate in the study. 136 in total, against Marnay Sec's 210. Per taster per pour that is 3.4 marks to Marnay Sec's 5.25. The marks were gentler too. Two thirds were minor, and Sol accounts for 4 of the 47 blockers in the study.
Sol's highest share came from one place. Balance, acidity and structure accounts for 37% of its tags, the biggest concentration any estate reached, and aroma definition adds another 15%. More than half of everything tasters flagged in a Sol glass came down to where the acid sat or how faintly the nose read. Sol's pours drew just 4 blockers in the whole study. 3 were balance, from 3 different tasters on 3 different pours.
Switchboard is where it peaks. 56% of Sol's tags on that flight were balance, acidity and structure, all 8 tasters marked at least one, and it ties as Sol's heaviest pour for major and blocker marks. It's the flight where Sol did worst in the first study, winning 1 matchup out of 27. Given the glass alone, the tasters went after the same thing again.
Fauve's biggest tag is polish and consistency
Fauve drew 191 written marks, 4.7 per taster per pour, which puts it second on volume, close to Grès, and second on severity at 36% major and 5% blocker.
Polish and consistency accounts for 24% of its tags and is Fauve's biggest fault point. Fauve is the only estate in the study whose biggest problem isn't balance. Per pour, Fauve draws 1.75 polish marks, more than any other estate.
On Fauve pours, a polish mark typically identifies an inconsistency between different parts of the same glass. The eight tasters left 70 of them, across all five flights. Here are some of the comments:
Not consistent, why is the attack one clean line, and here there are two.
Two separate oak regimes are being used. I would drop back to one.
Volatile lift running through the fruit making it hard to read.
The bitterness in the middle of the palate reads as an error more than an intentional cellar decision.
40% of all polish marks were tagged major or blocker, which means the cellar would have to fix them before pouring for a guest.
The Undercurrent pour is where this issue shows up most. A third of what tasters marked on that glass was polish and consistency, Fauve's highest on any flight, and six of the eight tasters left at least one polish comment on the pour.
For every other estate balance is the most marked fault tag by six to seventeen percentage points. Fauve's share for balance issues is at 21%, the only estate with under a quarter.
Grès's blocker rate is the highest in the study
Grès sits mid table on volume, 184 points at 4.6 per taster per pour. It carries the highest blocker rate in the study at 9.2% of its rated marks, with Marnay Sec close behind at 7.6%. Those blockers are equally distributed among the top 3: polish, balance and originality.
Grès's profile is close to field average. Balance at 28%, polish at 22%, originality at 14%. The one place it moves is texture. Bead and mousse plus cues and length make up 16% of Grès's marks, the heaviest texture load in the field. Aroma definition at 10% and colour and clarity at 4.4% are the lowest shares of any estate.
The Tidewater flight shows this perfectly. Texture tags account for 27% of everything tasters marked on that pour, against 11% for Marnay Sec, 9% for Fauve and 5% for Sol on the same flight. Grès is the only estate that got marked for what its wine did in the glass rather than how it read.
Marnay Sec drew the most marks in the study
210 rated marks, 5.25 per taster per pour, the most in the study. 48% of them were major or blocker, against Sol's 32%. That works out at 2.5 serious marks per taster per pour, more than double Sol's 1.1. And it holds flight by flight rather than resting on one bad pour: Marnay Sec drew the most serious marks on 4 of the 5 flights.
Marnay Sec's tags spread across every dimension in roughly the same proportions as the rest of the estates: balance 29%, polish 22%, originality and aroma definition 13% each. Its profile sits closest to the study average of the four estates but what's different is volume.
Cobble is one of the flights where we see a high volume of marks for Marnay Sec 1.1. Eight tasters left 44 marks on that pour, 28 of them major or blocker, spread across balance, originality, polish and aroma definition.
The takeaway
We poured glasses from 4 estates and had 8 tasters mark every fault they could find.
Something always turned up. 40 pours, 8 tasters, 754 marks. Sol took 82% of its open-flight matchups last week and still came back with 3.4 marks a pour.
Each estate gave the tasters a different list. More than half of Sol's marks are about balance and acidity, and on Switchboard that climbs to 56%. Fauve's structure holds up. The polish is what tasters went after. Grès's profile is the field average right up until Tidewater, where a quarter of the marks are about what the wine does in the glass rather than how it reads. Marnay Sec leads on none of the 8 tags and still draws the most marks of anyone.
The first study was about writing the spec. This one is about reading what comes back. Every pour came back needing a taster. The only thing that changed by estate was which part.
Methodology and limitations
8 of the 9 tasters from the first study returned, all working across sparkling and still wine and sourced from Oenra's network. They annotated the pours of 4 estates across 5 of the original 10 flights: Tidewater, Switchboard, The Undercurrent, Cobble and Rue Mistral.
There were no pairwise comparisons in this round. Each taster took one pour at a time and marked fault points directly against it, choosing from 8 fixed tags and rating each mark minor, major or blocker. Multiple tags per mark were allowed, so the 754 marks carry 1,051 tag mentions between them. 721 of the 754 carry a severity rating, and the severity figures above are calculated on those.
Coverage is complete. Every taster annotated every pour for every estate, so each estate has 40 taster-pour cells behind it.
One timing note. Sol's marks were collected on 10 July, and the other three estates were annotated on 13 and 14 July, in a separate session with the same tasters and the same instructions. We treat the rounds as comparable and report Sol's counts alongside the rest, but Sol's lower volume is the one figure here that a session effect could touch. Its tag composition, which is what the Sol section rests on, is unaffected by volume.
As in the first study, we poured 1 glass per estate per flight, which caps every claim above. The per-estate patterns hold across all 8 tasters and all 5 flights. The per-pour examples illustrate those patterns rather than standing as evidence on their own.
How we ran this study → Methodology