2016 Napa Valley – First Impressions 

BY ANTONIO GALLONI I JULY 19, 2017

Two thousand sixteen is shaping up to be another high quality vintage for Napa Valley. The young wines are aromatically expressive, open-knit and inviting, with soft contours, generous dark fruit and plenty of promise.

Tasting the 2016s at Bryant, Pritchard Hill 

The 2016 Growing Season

I spent two months in Napa Valley in 2016, which gave me an opportunity to live through a good portion of the growing season and harvest. In the early part of the year, 2016 looked like it would be another precocious harvest. By late July, as we were wrapping up our research on our Stags Leap and Yountville maps, viticulturists and winemakers were getting ready for a harvest that was tracking along the lines of 2015, a freakishly early harvest the likes of which Napa Valley had never seen before. But August brought with it unusually cool weather that pushed harvest back into more normal time frame and also extended hang time considerably. That, in turn, gave producers a wide window in which to pick.