On vintages…
We’ve had a steady stream of customers in our tasting room recently who’ve been remarking on the negative press the 2007 vintage in Oregon has been getting. To summarize and paraphrase our customers’ comments “What are they talking about – these wines are beautiful!”
I’ll be the first to tell you that ’07 was a difficult year. Cold when it should have been warm, hot when we needed cool, and wet when we wanted dry. And It rained on and off during harvest. That, apparently, is enough for many folks to write off the vintage. And that’s a shame, because it’s in the difficult vintages where you find out who the good producers are. In the superior vintages, virtually everybody makes excellent wine (2002 Oregon, 2005 Burgundy, for examples)- it’s not that challenging when you have superb raw material gifted to you by mother nature.
On the other hand, when the going gets tough, then we see who’s got what it takes to produce excellent wines under adverse conditions. There’s an old adage that rings very true – the good producers make good wine EVERY year. In looking at Burgundy, one could argue that the top tier of superstar producers have earned that status specifically because of their ability to make excellent wine year-in, year-out. Take your pick – DRC, Roumier, Rousseau, LeRoy, deVogüé, Lafon, Leflaive, Coche-Dury, Mugnier, and many others – they consistently produce delicious stuff despite the vagaries of nature from year to year. One might even argue that DRC actually excels in the “off years”.
People of course tend to like things tied up into neat, tidy packages, but wine unfortunately doesn’t often willingly conform. It is fair to say that certain vintages are indeed difficult and challenging, but to dismiss them out of hand is simply using too broad of a brush.
The other old adage that is also true is that one does not drink a vintage, one drinks a bottle of wine or a portion thereof!) You certainly need to be more selective in the challenging years, because all the wines are not uniformly excellent. Some of my favorite all-time wine experiences have been with “off year” wines, however, and I urge you to TASTE, TASTE, TASTE – you’ll find a lot of wines you like from the vintages that many would like to write off.
A lot of excellent 2007s are just hitting the market now, and I bet you’ll be surprised by how many wines you’ll really like from this too-quickly discarded vintage. It certainly favored the producers who work at the elegance-and-finesse end of the spectrum rather than the big-fruit-and-power style, but if you prefer the former, there’s a lot to like.
OK, he’s just saying this because he’s got 2007s to sell, right? To be honest, our 2007 Cuvée Martha Pirrie is nearly sold-out, and the 2007 Audrey we’re “releasing” tomorrow essentially sold-out as a Futures offering last fall. We will have a lot of 2007 La Paulée to sell, but that won’t be out until much later in the year, as we still have a good amount of the 2006 in stock (at 2,000 cases it’s the largest production bottling we’ve ever done, which of course precisely coincided with the largest fine-wine market slowdown in memory!)
To further defend myself from charges of being a shill for that which I have to sell, I will say that I’ve always been fairly vocal about not being a big fan of the 2006s – which I find too big and fruity in general, and for our style in particular, though they’ve proven very popular (maybe because the press said it was a “great” vintage!) That said, I think we did a nice job with the 06s and ours are fairly restrained for the vintage, but I simply prefer the 07s (and the 05s, for that matter.) Or maybe I’m just a contrarian, who knows!
At any rate, here’s the best advice I can give - let your palate be your guide.
And here’s my favorite vineyard on the planet, always a source of inspiration through “good” vintages and “bad”…
