2009 Gaia & Rey

Gaja. Everything changes and nothing changes. Angelo and Lucia Gaja seem well on their way to achieving something that is very rare among Piedmont's top estates, all of which remain family owned. Dealing successfully with generational succession. Gaia Gaja and her sister Rossana are now ever present, while their young brother, Giovanni, is off to college and seems destined for an important role himself. And the wines? They remain reference points for quality and consistency. The 2009 reds don't quite have the thrill that I often find in cooler, more vibrant years like 2008 and 2010, but in exchange they should offer years of pure pleasure pretty much right out of the gate.

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.