2009 Châteauneuf-du-Pape Mon Aïeul

"Two thousand nine made a lot of great wine but one thing that you need to look out for is dry tannins," Thierry Usseglio told me in November. He compared 2009 with 2006 but says that the later vintage has more structure and will need more patience. Like all of his colleagues Usseglio lamented the low yields achieved in 2010, which in his case were as low as 12 hectoliters per hectare in some sites, but said that the bright side was that the wines have excellent concentration of flavor without excess ripeness or weight. He compared 2010 to another great year, 2001, "because the wines are complete, with fantastic intensity, which is what still makes '01 a great year."

This is another producer who opted to make a single wine from 2008. "It was clearly going to be difficult to sell high-end cuvees from 2008," Thierry Usseglio told me, "and it's important not to risk your reputation by releasing wines that are supposed to be special if you aren't 100% proud of them. Very good isn't good enough and besides, it's also good to make a serious basic wine from a hard vintage like 2008, to show what you can achieve under pressure." Usseglio describes 2009 as "a vintage that will appeal to all types of people except maybe the ones who demand wines of enormite. They are absolutely not light and in the past they would probably have been considered pretty huge but the standard has been changed, especially since 2003." I found the 2009s here to be pretty serious wines, in fact, with real depth and chewiness, not to mention more dark fruit character than I expected.