2017 & 2018 Napa Valley In Depth

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | JANUARY 10, 2020

My tastings in Napa Valley this past fall were incredibly illuminating. Although much maligned, the 2017 vintage yielded a number of exceptional wines. Quality is irregular, though, and there are certainly many 2017s that show the signs of a very challenging growing season. Readers will need to be especially selective. Two thousand eighteen is a much more even year. The wines are still in barrel, in many cases not blended, but my early tastings suggest they have quite a bit of potential.

The 2017s…It’s Complicated

Two thousand seventeen will undoubtedly be remembered mostly for the devastating fires that swept across much of Napa and Sonoma counties. The photos and personal accounts of that time are indeed harrowing. When it comes to the wines, though, fires were not the defining event.

Ric Forman's estate vineyard. St. Helena.

The year got started with a very wet winter that caused severe flooding, landslides and a host of other treacherous conditions. By the time summer arrived, the weather turned dry and hot. "We had more than 30 days with temperatures over 100 degrees, which is just crazy" Lou Kapscándy told me. An especially brutal heat spike was forecast around Labor Day. That event turned out to be far more dramatic and protracted than expected. Temperatures reached 120 degrees in some places, with no respite at night. Vines reacted by shutting down. In some places, Brix actually retreated. “I have never seen Brix go back like that,” Mike Smith told me recently. “People were freaking out.” Winemakers had to decide whether to pick or wait for vines to recover and resume ripening. Site, farming and stylistic choices resulted in a wide range of decisions. To be sure, the Labor Day heat would have been even more devastating if not for 2015, after which shade cloth became widely used in the valley.

Proprietor Denise Adams with her new team headed by Winemaker Sarah Donley and General Manager Kit Gilbert at Adamvs.

Then, of course, the fires arrived in October. The early pickers were already in barrel, but others had wines in tank, or fruit on the vine. Power was off for an extended period of time and roads were closed. Some winemakers were able to make it into their facilities to do at least some rudimentary, manual winemaking, others were not. At the far extremes, some wines were completely lost because they could not be tended to, while at the other end of the spectrum, high-end wineries with generator power closed their tanks and controlled pumpovers and punchdowns remotely via technology, literally as if nothing at all had happened.