The 2023 Wine Harvest
An early snapshot from the San Luis Obispo Coast
On June 6th as I watched the final rainstorm of the season blow through the Central Coast of California, I knew that this was not destined to be an average vintage. The preceding winter months had brought record rainfall. This was much appreciated after three years of drought. No one who farms in California complains about the rain. These heavy rains flushed the salts in the soil built up from the irrigation of the prior dry years. But these same rains persisted much longer than normal keeping soils cold and saturated well into early Summer so that the growing season was pushed out much later than average — at least three weeks later. This pattern of vine development is more typical of a classic continental European growing season than coastal California.
That last rain event also coincided with flowering in the SLO Coastal Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vineyards I make wine from. The nascent clusters are particularly vulnerable to fungal infection during bloom. These infections are not only harmful at the time of infection but can also lie dormant through the Summer and then reemerge in the Fall as the berries ripen. This was not a year when lazy or inattentive farming succeeded. The best cared for vineyards ripened without disease issues. Many vineyards did not, and as harvest approached, I observed some terrible outbreaks of fungal disease — as bad as any I have seen in over four decades of grape growing.
Cold and late growing seasons like this pose more risk than promise. This is even more so with the cooler sites I prefer to make wine from. For warmer sites colder years can sometimes be a benefit. The last really cold Summer and Fall was 2011. The reds wines I made from that vintage had to be carefully sorted to eliminate the herbaceous flavors. I vividly recall tasting and rejecting many barrels due to underripe character. The 2011 white wines on the other hand were amazing and wonderfully long lived. But this year was not just cold like 2011. It was also late and wet — resembling much more the largely unsuccessful 2006 vintage. In that vintage harvest rains swept in early here in the Central Coast and rotted more than 50% of the clusters in Pinot Noir. Most producers made poor red wines. The North Coast stayed dry that fall and the Pinots I made from Carneros were interesting in their own acerbic way and very long lived.
It was with a genuine sense of foreboding that Labor Day came and went with harvest not even close. The standard winemaker’s joke about this late summer holiday is that it’ a laboring day and there have been very few vintages when I have not worked over the three-day weekend. So, we all held our collective breath and waited almost another three full weeks for the first Pinot to be picked. Luckily, neither rainstorms nor heat arrived to damage the vintage and except for end of October frosts that affected late ripening north county reds the weather gods were kind to us.
The various parts of the cluster that contribute to flavor do not ripen simultaneously. Skin, pulp, seed, and stem are all on their own nonsynchronous clocks as far as development and the trick is to try and line up as many as possible to achieve the ever-elusive balanced ripeness. The leaf canopy was unusually robust this year but thankfully the crop was a bit on the high side as well so that helped offset the potential for rocket ripening when the sugars in the pulp soar past the other flavor curves. Seed ripeness lagged behind as it does in almost all cold vintages, but not as severely as in 2011 so extreme herbaceousness was not a problem. The ripeness of the skins which correlates with both color and fresh fruit flavor was fairly rapid this year and in some vineyards was even ahead of pulp ripeness, which is rare indeed. I was very cautious with stem use this year especially in Pinot Noir as the seeds seemed to have sufficient herbal characteristics to obviate the need. The later ripening Rhone reds seemed a better choice for stems.
Predicting quality earlier than the Spring following the vintage is a fool’s errand even in red wines — with whites it is an idiot’s. But I have never been shy about barging ahead where angels fear to tread. So, here goes. This year’s Pinots are superb! I am honored to have nurtured them into barrel. I believe they will prove to be amongst the best I have ever made. The color is intense, and the hues are bright due to this year’s acids. I expect that like the other late harvest reds I have made that these wines will be long lived. However, I’ve gotten that prediction wrong in the past. 1982 being a prime example where the wines never really developed — they went from awkward youths to clumsy adults!
Some of the later reds are also amazing. I made my first ever Mourvèdre from Paper Street Vineyard in Paso this year and it is a stunner. I’ve only got one dry white at this point — a stainless fermented Greengate Vineyard Chardonnay from the Edna Valley that is as tasty as a peach. Given the weather pattern of this harvest I expect the whites to shine — just how brilliantly is anyone’s guess at this point.
Making wine in a globally warming world doesn’t mean all vintages will be hot — as 2023 demonstrated. But, as was predicted by climatologists from the beginning, it does mean that we will see more extreme and frequent weather instability. This year once again bears that out with an extremely wet late and cold Winter and Spring setting the tempo for the harvest. We were fortunate that very few of the many potential downsides to a late harvest materialized.
Global warming has once again played a powerful role in disrupting terroir. As just one local example, warmer sites like the eastside of Paso will taste more like cooler westside locations this year. After soil weather is the single greatest contributor to terroir. Because soils change so slowly, and our weather now changes so abruptly it may be more accurate to call climate more important to modern concepts of terroir than the soil — certainly from a disruptive point of view. Indeed, the very concept of terroir requires some climatic stability around a norm — sadly, this no longer exists. It breaks my heart to say this, but perhaps it’s time to retire the idea of terroir until some distant future when our climate recovers from our predations and is once more in harmony with the soils and capable of expressing terroir.
