2009 Barbaresco Sorì Tildìn

Angelo Gaja doesn't say too much about his wines these days. He doesn't need to. The wines more than speak for themselves. What impresses me most about the 2009s is the elegance of their tannin. This is a vintage where managing the crop load was critical in achieving balance. Gaja is one of the very few growers who got it right. His wines stand out for their textural finesse and sense of harmony. Although Gaja is easily the most glamorous winery in Piedmont, it remains a family affair, with Angelo Gaja's wife Lucia, and their daughters Gaia and Rossana increasingly involved, and their younger brother Giovanni set to follow in their footsteps. Long-time winemaker Guido Rivella keeps a much lower profile, but he is the man who has produced all of Gaja's most legendary wines going back to 1970. Angelo Gaja describes 2009 as a year with a lot of rain until June. The bunches on average were loose and the berries small, which resulted in high skin-to-juice ratios, which is quite favorable for ageworthy wines.

Angelo Gaja is well aware of the conflicting currents that are making production of rich, high-alcohol wines increasingly tricky. "Global warming started to show its effect in 1996," he told me. "We had very big wines in earlier vintages like 1971, 1961 and 1947, but now those kinds of vintages are much more common. The question we haven't been able to answer yet is: will more intensity of heat and light have an influence on the longevity of our wines? And of course, the more consumers insist on lower alcohol levels in their wines, the more the wines will have to be manipulated. Let us do our jobs as growers and winemakers." In recent years, like a number of his colleagues in the Langhe hills, Gaja has been green harvesting in a series of passes through the vines so as not to overdo this step in warm years when the fruit would be very likely to reach sufficient ripeness without cutting crop levels in mid-summer. Gaja is slow to pass judgment on new vintages and he's still assessing 2009, which he describes as "not a big vintage like 2007. Maybe it's more like 2008, which is a very interesting year, elegant and balanced but with less body than 2007." Two thousand eleven, he added, has been difficult for the dolcetto and barbera as there was a lot of drying of the grapes in the late-summer heat.