Vintage Retrospective: The 2008 Napa Valley Cabernets

BY STEPHEN TANZER | MAY 9, 2018

The crazy weather year of 2008 on California’s North Coast somehow managed to produce many highly concentrated, stylish, complex and balanced wines that are just now entering their periods of peak pleasure. 

As the challenges of difficult growing seasons fade with time, two things happen. First, in the memory of winemakers, rain events magically become less extreme: the actual torrential rainfall that plagued a harvest shrinks to moderate precipitation and eventually to a vague recollection of moisture. Freakishly cool or brutally hot harvest weather or damaging hail storms are virtually forgotten, as the body has a short memory for pain. At the same time, as the wines themselves mature and are transformed, they reveal themselves to be less extreme after all, until at some point it can be next to impossible to find the insanity of the vintage in the bottle. I’ve seen these patterns play out again and again in temperate wine-growing areas like Bordeaux, Burgundy and northern Italy—and even in normally hot, bone-dry growing regions. Two thousand eight was such a year for California’s North Coast.

Hundred Acre's Kayli Morgan Vineyard

An Extreme Year Beginning with Brutal Frost

The 2008 vintage on California’s North Coast was a terrifying roller-coaster ride; I originally described it as a growing season that witnessed every possible plague except frogs and boils. Others referred to it as a year of fire and ice. As I noted in my initial review of the year’s wines, the 2008 season began with an epic and extended spring frost from late March through the end of April, which cut crop levels dramatically in many areas, even in some steep hillside sites that normally escape this peril as the frigid air slides down to the valley floor. Conditions were as perilous in much of inland Sonoma County as they were in Napa Valley. Night after night after night, the frost alarms went off before dawn and the wind machines and sprinkler systems went into action in vineyards lucky enough to have them.

Following normal copious winter rainfall in January and a bit of final precipitation in February, 2008 also brought drought conditions: at the Oakville weather station a total of about one inch of rain was recorded between the beginning of March and the end of September. The flowering was drawn out and the fruit set was very uneven in many areas owing to the dry spring and the effects of the frost. 

Even where the vines flowered reasonably well, cluster maturity often varied widely from vine to vine, and even within the same vines, threatening to throw off the ultimate balance of the wines. With many frost-hit properties forced by financial considerations to retain their second-generation grapes, it was a challenge through the summer to crop-thin so that this later fruit would have a chance to ripen, and to green-harvest assiduously in order to minimize the irregularity in ripeness of the fruit that remained on the vines.