2011 Côte-Rôtie La Viallière

I tasted through this year's set of wines with Jean-Michel Gerin's son Alexis, who has recently been taking on more responsibility at the family domain along with his brother Michael.He's among those who find the 2011s "quite fine and often delicate," which he thinks makes them wines to drink young "for their pretty fruit and because the fragility of structure, even if there's balance, makes them a risk to age too long."That's not the case with the 2012s, he added, "because even though they show a lot of fruit now, there's good acidity and tannins underneath.Not like the 2010s of course, but with the right material to age."

I tasted at the Gerin cellar with Michael Gerin, who was hobbling around, his foot having been broken in a rugby match played the night before the domain's harvest began.It was a match that his father told him to skip, he told me, "because he was worried that I'd get hurt and be out of commission during picking and crush.I guess he was right."In the Gerins' opinion the 2011s "are very nicely balanced and intensely fruity, with very good acidity but not too much," and they can be compared in many ways to the 2006s. The red wines "have a red fruit and floral character that's a lot like pinot noir, which is what our grandfather said was the true character of Cote-Rotie."It was important not to let yields run away in 2011, Gerin told me, "because the risk of dilution was very high.That was tough for some people after the short crops of the last few years."