1999 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places

"Nineteen ninety-nine is one of the four best vintages of the century for our appellation, along with '61, '47 and '21," opines Jean-Michel Gerin; "but the key to making balanced wines in '99 was controlling yields." "But is 1999 typical Cote-Rotie?" I asked. "I don't know if it's typical," he replied, "but it's great, especially if the function of wine is to give pleasure." The '99s, Gerin adds, are built for long aging. In comparison, he says, the 2000s are almost ready to drink, like the '98s.

Gerin considers his '99s the best wines he made to date. On his parcels not hit by the early June hail, he carried out a severe green harvest, with the result that the overall estate production was just 32 hectoliters per hectare. Fruit was harvested with potential alcohol from 13.5% to a freakish 15.5% in Grandes Places. "We got about 2-1/2 degrees of additional ripeness in the week before the harvest," he told me. Still, he says, the wines show outstanding acid/alcohol balance; they're very ripe but not too ripe. "We haven't used fertilizers now for 11 years, so we get good pHs," Gerin noted. "We're just now getting to the point where the terroir is expressing itself." If anything, Gerin is using even more new oak today, always a blend of wood from disparate sources, including America, France, Hungary and Russia. The blend is always better than any of the individual components, says Gerin, adding that he uses very toasty barrels. "This kind of wood treatment works well with our syrah, because I do a long cuvaison(34 days in '99), and because at the north side of the appellation the soils are based on minerally schist rich in iron oxide.