WineInk: The 2023 vintage

If you are a winemaker, it helps to be an optimist.

After all, like all farmers, your livelihood directly correlates to the whims of Mother Nature. Have a good growing season and the chances are good that your harvest will come out the way you hoped and planned. Have a summer filled with heat spikes or unexpected rain and the opposite will happen. It helps, as Monty Python suggested in the song, to always look at the bright side of life. Fortunately for West Coast winemakers, especially those in the Napa Valley, 2023 has smiled on those optimists.

“2023 predicted to be the Vintage of a Lifetime in Napa Valley,” proclaimed the headline this week in a press release sent out by the Napa Valley Vintners, the trade organization that represents the growers and producers in America’s most famed wine region. If there is anyone more optimistic than winemakers, it is the group that represents them.

“Growers and winemakers’ patience was rewarded with an exceptional, age-worthy vintage,” read the subhead to the piece which states that 2023 may go down as one of the greats in recent memory. As one in the middle – OK, late middle – of a long life, I have heard this kind of acclaim before, but the circumstances, at least at this stage, seem to bear out the early predictions.

What makes a great vintage? For red wines, it is one where the grapes provide balance, freshness, purity, elegance, intensity of color, and solid tannic structure. These result from a vintage where the weather and soils work in unison to allow the grapes to grow on schedule and then hang long on the vines into the fall as they mature.

2023 started with substantial rains in the region (Remember our January and February snowfall?) that set the table well, filling reservoirs and providing a solid cover crop. A cool spring delayed the start of the growing season by almost two weeks.

“The remainder of the growing season was a mild one. Cooler growing conditions meant extended hang time for grapes,” said Brittany Pederson, director of viticulture for Renteria Vineyard Management in the Napa Valley Vintners release. “Knowing we’d likely harvest into November, it was our job to ripen the fruit and keep it protected long enough to hang through the extended time frame.”

SommTV, the great online channel that chronicles the world of wine, dropped a video this week that features four Napa Valley winemakers discussing the 2023 Harvest. Moderated by Renée Ary, the winemaker at Duckhorn, the panel was seated with cocktails (The drinks looked delicious) at the Market bar in St. Helena, Calif. Joining her were Matt Crafton of the Calistoga-based Chateau Montelena; Macario Montoya of the aptly named Roots Run Deep Winery, which sources grapes from throughout the Valley; and Shaina Harding of Gaderian wines, a winery founded by former Olympic swimmer Natalie Coughlin Hall. It was obvious just from watching the group that there was a giddiness about the state of the current harvest.

watch.sommtv.com/featured/videos/2023-napa-valley-vintage-report

“We had those warm days at just the right time,” said Montoya about the summer months that fostered the harvest.

“I kept thinking that we were going to get rain and would have to rush, but that never happened,” echoed Harding when talking about the process.

Indeed, it seemed the most difficult part of this harvest was just remaining patient before calling the pick, which for many Cabernet Sauvignon vineyards in Napa did not happen until after Halloween.

A great vintage, while always about quality, is also about quantity. After all, more wine means more wine to sell.

“In every harvest, there are some challenges,” said Harding, “and right now for me, I have a little bit more wine in the cellar than I anticipated. I need more barrels and more new French Oak.”

Ary chimed in, saying, “I think my favorite part of the harvest is the logistics; I love playing the chess game.”

An interesting comment from a winemaker who oversees a vast collection of different varieties and vineyards throughout the Napa Valley.

As good as the harvest is in Napa this year – and remember, the region is coming off a decade of difficulty, including two years of pandemic conditions along with the devastation of the Glass Fire in October of 2020 – not all of the world’s wine regions are having such good luck.

The word heard from Italy is that quantity is an issue with the current vintage. Overall, it is estimated that there will be a drop in production of Italian wine ranging from 10-30% in 2023 depending upon the region. Piedmont, home of the great Nebbiolo-based wines, is expected to be down 17% which is bad enough, but Tuscany (-30%) and Sicily (-45%) showed even more prodigious drops in yields. This, is the result of September heat spikes that cooked the Boot.

France was a little more sanguine. According to L’Atelier du Vin, a French wine tool company that keeps track of the vintage in the diverse regions of the country, “The Loire Valley, Champagne, Alsace, and Burgundy were spared from downy mildew, leading to good production volumes and grape quality.” That’s the good news. The bad? “Bordeaux, on the other hand, was ravaged by downy mildew, as well as the heatwave, hail, and heavy rainfall that hit the south of France.” Ouch.

As we said at the start, winemakers and growers – no matter where they are – are subject to the vicissitudes of climate. This year, Napa Valley has been blessed. As Karen MacNeil, author of “The Wine Bible” and a Napa Valley resident, noted in a recent YouTube video about the 2023 harvest, “Every century, every place has its legendary vintages. I do not doubt that 2023 will go down as one of the most phenomenal vintages ever in Napa Valley. Every vintner I’ve talked to about 2023 has been nothing short of ecstatic.”

Matt Crafton may have said it best about the harvest in the gathering for SommTV:

“One of the things that I try and explain to people about this vintage so far is that it’s not like a peach where all of a sudden it’s ripe one day. There are all of these really beautiful little picking windows. To me, it’s more like music. What an amazing opportunity to have the luxury to pick at all of these individual spaces to make this breadth of flavor.” He paused, then added, “I think the symphonic aspect of this vintage is going to be something that is going to be just really incredible.”

Spoken like a true optimist.