Assessing the Season

11/18/09 - It's very early to be assessing the 2009 vintage, but it's still of value to do so, in part as a baseline for the evaluations of the wines to come: those that come after the wines have been in bottle for 3 month, 6 months, a year, and of course, many more after that.  The wines are always changing, naturally, and that is what makes them so intriguing and captivating.  And this is where it starts.

The easy call on 2009 is that it is a lot like 2006.  It does have some basic points of comparison, such as being a warmer vintage, but there is more that distinguishes it from 2006 than aligns it.  Most significantly, it was highly variable depending on where the fruit was coming from.  2006 was a pretty straight-ahead warm year, calling for picking in a reasonably predictable window and with fairly uniform results. That was a year where the challenges were minimal, and the vintage made success fairly easy to obtain (I thank my stars, as a newbie in the vintage).  In 2009, fruit from different sites had to be picked at very different times, depending on the soil, water,and microclimate.  The range for picking from our small number of sites extended from September 26 to October 26, a fairly large window, considering the heat.

While 2007 and 2009 couldn't be more different in terms of the conditions (cool and early rain in 2007, heat and dehydration in 2009), they were similar in one respect:  they both called for a great deal of judgment in picking that varied greatly by sub-appellation, by vineyard, and even within certain blocks of vineyards.  Conditions varied from north to south, with dehydration being the issue in northern AVAs, and obtaining ideal physiological ripeness being the challenge in the south.

It's early, yes, but one thing is clear: 2009 will provide wines with a wide range of character and quality, delivering intrigue and entertainment for quite some time as the unique aspects of the vintage unfold. It proves once again, that in spite of the inexorable forces that tend to classify each vintage with a narrow label, there will be many great wines to explore, and this is where fun begins.