Winophilia

Issue 160 of the International Wine Cellar, published yesterday, leads off with extensive coverage of the 2010 red Burgundies, one of the most exciting vintages for these wines of my professional lifetime. The new issue also highlights the superb 2010s and 2009s from the southern Rhône Valley and Germany’s 2010 vintage. For as little as $19.95 for a two-month subscription, you get immediate and unlimited access to the current issue, as well as to the easily searchable and sortable IWC data base of nearly 90,000 tasting notes.

Whatever you normally spend on a bottle, the International Wine Cellar will help you become a smarter consumer and drink better wine.

Here’s what you’ll find in the massive new issue:

2010 Red Burgundies. Following the fleshy, very ripe and sometimes overhyped 2009s from a warm dry year, vintage 2010 has yielded classic red Burgundies with a capital C. These densely packed but elegant, aromatically complex wines, with their perfumed mineral, floral and fruity high notes; their transparency to site and their pliant yet taut middle palates and suave tannins, will be must purchases for serious Burgundy lovers with deep pockets.

2010 and 2009 Southern Rhône Wines. A small crop and a consistently warm growing season without extreme heat yielded another superb set of wines in the southern Rhone Valley in 2010. This is a rare vintage whose better examples offer both power and finesse, and the wines have the structure, depth and vivacity for a slow and graceful evolution in bottle.

Germany 2010. Our German correspondent Joel B. Payne reports that the cool, classic, high-acid 2010 harvest yielded a very small crop with an unusually wide range of quality. But the best rieslings, mostly picked late, combine uncanny vitality with off-the-charts concentration levels.