2000 IPNC Panel on Vintages: Bertrand Ambroise; Harry; Jasper Morris, MW and moderator; Frederic Mugnier and Veronique Drouhin present, but not shown.

At the International Pinot Noir Celebration on July 29 (2000) Veronique Drouhin, of DDO, and I, representing Oregon and joining two Burgundians on the panel for the Saturday main tasting, chose the same comparison of our 1997 & 1998 reserves to speak to ageability and vintage. Although the '98s showed great richness and amazing potential, the 1997s were real surprises to the 600 attendees, providing ultimate, current elegance and finesse, driving home that well-made doesn't necessarily mean looking the same.

Wine is art to some people and commodity to others. If you want stimulation and intellectual challenge, the wine you seek will likely be different than one that gives you confidence that this bottle will be like last year's. Warm climates with predictable weather reproduce themselves reliably in most years. Cool climates often give radically different views of the same wine variety. And that means getting the best you'll ever taste from the variety in some years and average in others. Reward is proportional to risk.

Risk can be hedged, however. We suggest to our friends that in great vintages they buy across-the-board, and in challenging years they buy winemakers, wineries and vineyards who know how to eke out at least the equal of the warm climate quality despite exceptionally challenging vintages.

And wine critics don't help a lot in that search. These days, anyone can log-on to weather web sites and find out if it rained during harvest in a wine region, without having to buy an oversized glossy magazine with movie stars on the cover. How to characterize the differences of varied vintages and select the premium producers is not an easy job to do, having to balance the pressures of making the vintage into a news story with a deadline to sell magazines against the desire to be accurate and thorough. To do it well it many times takes much longer, to wait for a particularly tight vintage to open up and show its stuff or waiting to make their judgments on the best of a variable vintage rather than the earliest released, often worst of the vintage. Not an easy job, but if their readers are to get what they pay for, one that should strive for precision. Defining shades of gray, rather than assuming black-and-white.

Challenging vintages are normally weather-affected. That doesn't always mean rain at harvest. Sometimes the rain messes with flowering in June, or sometimes it's a baking heat or a long, cool growing season that compromises the fruit quality. Savvy winemakers cope with the changes using their knowledge of the key variables and options in tweaking them. Some adjustments, like irrigation, sprays, canopy management, crop thinning or harvest timing are in the vineyard. Response in the winery might address sorting, sulfur levels, yeast approach, maceration and enzyme use, fermentation temperatures, new barrel percentages and the like. As with the maxim regarding great leaders surfacing in time of need and rarely in peacetime, great winemakers are identified in challenging vintages.

One of the reasons most of our peer winemakers cite for moving to Oregon is the challenge. There is little to test skills in warm climates. It's more like a job than the art of winemaking. We need consumers to appreciate not only the big, round, deep, easily huggable vintages like 1994 that most of us have learned to associate with good red wines, thanks to the plentiful warm climate models of cabernet, merlot, and syrah, but also the weather affected vintages like 1993 and 1997. They carry less size, but have a better chance at transparency, elegance, nuance and early-drinking.

Big vintages have an advantage of pleasing on both a superficial level in their youth and on a complexly layered level with age, so long as they are balanced. Less full years give an earlier delicacy and ability to reflect site differences, thus the aphorism that some vintages are to drink while others age. In 1998 and 1999, Cheryl and I had to consciously take steps to moderate what we pulled from grapes, since we knew the vintages' short croploads and full ripeness could easily give overextraction and clumsiness. Again, a balanced wine is the aim and, even though they might look different on the surface, different vintages can give equivalent complexity, ageability and pleasure.

Cool climate, cool wines. Because they aren't always the same.