While there is currently much hype about the 2009 vintage throughout Europe, including Burgundy, my experience to date – while limited – suggests consistently high levels of ripeness and low levels of acidity, thus, inadequate tension in many wines. While 2009 is a far better vintage than the dessicated  2003, I agree with commentator Alan Meadows who notes something similar between the two years. For me (red) Burgundy is all about tension and the paucity of this characteristic, so necessary for Pinot Noir to dance as it should, leaves me less than riveted.

What is ‘tension’? I believe it is a certain nervousness, or energy in the the mouth, when drinking fine Pinot. This quality comes from fruit that tiptoes the better side of the just-ripe-enough precipice and subsequently, boasts fairly high levels of slaking acidity and savoury taut tannins. Let’s face it, Pinot Noir that is over 13.5%, or 14% at the most extreme, simply lacks this tension no matter the winemaking endeavours to obviate this issue: whole cluster ferments and the brambly texture that results from the use of stems, or acidity adjustments. The caveat to these techniques is that tension is not built around tannins or acidity alone, but rather, is founded on a very narrow window of fruit-ripeness (neither too ripe nor green) which delivers these structural attributes, together with a transparency and nervousness in a wine. Moreover the use of stems raises pH and is therefore frequently ill-suited to warmer climes (in the context of Pinot Noir) where acidity is insufficient from the start and where rapid sugar ripening in the grapes nevertheless sees stubbornly green stems.

I am doing my best to put words to a sensation that perspicacious Pinot-lovers tend to understand on rather ambiguous terms. Thus, put more passionately, Pinot must pirouette and bounce around the mouth! It must not be sweet nor too sour. It must make one salivate and return for glass after glass!  It must be grown on assiduously chosen sites in order to provide us with these qualities. At its best, Pinot Noir hails from vintages that are not necessarily providores of uniform ripeness and structure, as with 2009, but instead vintages that provide the hallowed ‘tension’ of which I speak among successful wines, even if the same vintage is less than successful across certain sites and among many growers.

I believe that 2008 has given us many wines with real tension. Clearly, the whites are more consistent than the reds, with the vintage’s hallmark kick of forceful acidity on the finish to balance good levels of ripeness. Indeed, choosing the better reds is an act ridden with potential calamities for finances and familial relationships, with many stringy wines due to under-ripe tannins; clumsy malic wines-some with pronounced volatility-due to uncooperative malolactic ferments;  and soupy, simple wines because of excessive chaptalization. However research will reward those seeking what Anne Gros calls ‘classic’ wines, or wines that remind me of personal favourites 2001 and 1991. Like 2008, neither of these vintages was consistently fine across appellations. In fact, like 2008, both vintages were tough going and rewarded those growers who waited for ripeness and selected their fruit carefully. However these vintages provided many good wines of skeletal composure, with just enough fruit on dem’ bones to make for refreshing drinking while imbuing Pinot Noir with what it must have when at its best, rather than at its most showy, tension.