One of America’s most influential wine publications, Wine Spectator, has seen fit to identify the 2009 harvest of California Pinot Noir as potentially the best ever. While the magazine has yet to taste all of the more than 600 wines it plans to assess, senior editor and lead Californian taster James Laube said an “unprecedented” number of the Pinots sampled so far have rated 90 points or above — a rating that the magazine deems as “outstanding.”


“Out of the gate, based on the 2009 California Pinots I’ve tasted so far, it’s clearly one of the state’s most successful vintages to date,” Laube said. “The off-the-chart numbers don’t lie.”


The new century has been kind to Californian Pinots, with superior vintages emerging from 2001 through 2003, and again in 2007, another year Wine Spectator lauded as perhaps the best ever. Credit for the quality of the 2009 vintage goes to the “near-perfect growing season,” Laube said. 


Not everyone is unreservedly enthusiastic about the 2009 vintage, though. Shanken News Daily, distributed by Wine Spectator’s publishing company, in its e-mail update quotes Ted Lemon, owner of Sonoma, Calif.’s Littorai Wines, who said “the discussion boils down to whether we define ‘great’ as how they taste upon release, or at full maturity.”