The Bewildering 2024 Season in Argentina

BY JOAQUÍN HIDALGO | JUNE 05, 2024

Two thousand twenty-four was another warm year, similar to 2023, 2020 and 2017. However, the wines paint quite a different picture. Based on the examples I tasted recently out of barrel, the 2024s seem like the product of a cool season. But things get even more complicated. The 2024 vintage displays an energy and flavor profile that hasn’t been seen in some time.

The 2024 vintage in Argentina was marked by the El Niño phenomenon, which created high temperatures in the west of the country. Significant snowfall allowed for irrigation and counterbalanced these conditions.

From Salta in the north down to Patagonia in the south, the 2023-2024 harvest was anomalous in several ways. The most important factor was the weather, which was heavily affected by the transition from La Niña to El Niño. Roughly, this means a shift from a cool, dry cycle to a wet, warm one. Beginning in the equatorial Pacific, the ripple effects have been more of a tsunami than a butterfly, such as the mass flooding in southern Brazil being just one example.

These conditions led to some unusual phenomena to the east of the Andes. Snowfall last winter was intense, so much so that snowmelt from the mountains was enough to push the Mendoza River into the desert by the middle of the 2024 summer, something that hadn’t happened since the 1990s.

The large number of winter storms and, thus, ample water for irrigation were counteracted by another phenomenon: the Zonda wind. This wind swept down from the Pacific mountains onto Argentina's plains and continued until mid-November. While the snow it brought to the peaks was welcome, strong wind also caused plenty of damage in the vineyards.

The Zonda Season

The Zonda is caused by the Foehn effect – like the Chinook in the USA – and is one of the most potent examples in the world. As wind rises to the western face of the Andes, it sheds its water load in the form of snow before climbing to heights between 18,000 and 23,000 feet. There, it expands before falling upon the plains and growing more compressed, now warm and dry and gusting at speeds of up to 70 miles an hour. If the Zonda strikes during budding or blossoming – and that’s exactly what happened in the 2023 spring – it will significantly affect the subsequent harvest.    

Initially, the winter was milder than usual in the vineyard areas, especially in the north of Argentina, resulting in early budding, fewer hours of cold temperatures and lower yields. “Tears swept through the valley,” laments Francisco Puga at El Porvenir, referring to the meager harvest.  

Meanwhile, Mendoza and San Juan – which account for 95% of grape production in the country – saw broken buds and poor fruit setting, especially among the Malbec vines, as well as a few frosts, all of which ought to have affected yields. And yet, the overall harvest volume was somewhat confounding.

The ability to irrigate the vineyards appears to have been vital to achieving ideal health and perfect ripeness by March, when the golden harvest window defined the wines of the vintage.