Paso Robles 2018 & 2017: Grace and Power

BY JOSH RAYNOLDS | DECEMBER 10, 2020

Following the hot 2017 vintage, growers and winemakers in Paso Robles were relieved to have a cooler vintage in 2018. The long growing season and moderate conditions led to an unhurried harvest and a larger-than-normal crop of healthy fruit. The results are outstanding. 

Growers and winemakers in Paso Robles, along with their colleagues up and down the West Coast, had their hands full with the hot, dry 2017 vintage. At their best, the wines combine ripeness and energy, especially if they were made from fruit grown in cold, coastal-influenced vineyards. In 2018, by contrast, Mother Nature delivered cooler weather overall, as well as beneficial rains in late March and early April, and a long, extended harvest, with no heat pressure to confront.

Paso Robles has always been a somewhat misunderstood and easily stereotyped winegrowing region. Yes, it can get hot, especially on the east side of Highway 101, where the landscape is flat and often barren and exposed. On the west side of 101, by contrast, the terrain is hilly, often dramatically so, with dense woodlands and high-altitude vineyards that are directly exposed to a strong Pacific Ocean influence. Diurnal shifts here are regularly and predictably in the 40-degree-Fahrenheit range, with nighttime conditions often downright frigid, even in the middle of summer. Those factors, plus the abundance of limestone across the soils of the region, help the wines maintain uncanny freshness for their ripeness – and ripe they often are, with alcohol levels consistently hovering in the 15% range and quite often at 16% plus. On paper, these wines should be thick, hot and ungainly, but that simply isn’t the case, at least for the best producers, such as those reviewed here.

The high-altitude vineyards of the Adelaida District produce some of Paso Robles' most complex, ageworthy wines.