gerald wrote:
Went to the Addie Bassin 2003 California Cab barrel sample tasting
last week.

Once again, I wonder what is done to wine from barrel sample to
bottled wine that so radically changes the approachability of the
wine?

I also tasted some 02's from the same vineyard, and they are hard as
bricks..

Gerald,
The estimable Prof. Emile Peynaud offered an explanation for that
phenomenon in his book "The Taste of Wine." He notes that the
bitterness/astrigency of tannins changes as a function of their size.
If one were to graph their bitterness as a function of size, what you'd
see is that small sized tannins are relatively non-astringent, but as
they increase in size (as they inevitably do as they age and/or get
exposed to oxygen) they become *very* astringent, but further on become
increasingly softer and less bitter -- until at a large enough size they
become insoluble at fall out as sediment.
So, at the point of barrel samples, most red wines still have small,
softer tannnins. I would presume that most winemakers have a good sense
of when their barrel samples begin to toughen up and probably stop
offering tastes of them to the public. By the time they make it into
bottles, they're usually close to that maximum astringency, which then
begins its slow decline as the wine ages.
We usually think of exposure of a wine in its youth to oxygen as a
softening process (white wines become "rounder," micro-oxygenated reds
become softer) but in truth the tannins will become harder before they
soften, as they inevitably must. The exposure to oxygen just
accelerates this process.

Mark Lipton