We report a series of 31 patients after surgically aortic valve implantation of a bovine Sorin Mitroflow bioprosthesis with early severe structural valve degeneration (SVD) despite absence of known risk factors. Half of the patients underwent re-intervention and more than one third died without re-intervention, mostly prematurely due to heart failure caused by SVD. The Sorin Mitroflow valve was prone to early SVD even in very old patients, which may be at least in part due to a lack of anti-calcification treatment and its peculiar design. This led to additional suffering of the patients and added healthcare expense. The inferior durability was largely undetected for almost 2 decades, which in retrospect was mainly because earlier studies relied on SVD diagnosis only at reoperation, reported no regular echocardiographic monitoring and did not consider the competing risk of death despite high mortality rates. To avoid a similar delay in the recognition of specific problems with new surgical valves analogue to the already ongoing TAVR-registries the introduction of mandatory SAVR-registries with regular echocardiographic monitoring and uniform definition of SVD as well as broad training of all cardiologists and echocardiographers involved in SVD screening and treatment seems reasonable.