Washington: Neither Smoke Nor Rain Nor Heat Nor Frost of Night…

BY STEPHEN TANZER | DECEMBER 03, 2020

Since enduring record heat in 2015, Washington’s growers and winemakers have enjoyed an unprecedented string of very good to exceptional vintages. Even 2020, so tricky in Oregon and parts of California owing to massive wildfires up and down the West Coast, appears to have been very successful in Washington. This year’s report features mostly red wines from 2018 and 2017 and whites from 2019 and 2018. All three of these growing seasons were capable of yielding outstanding wines. 

The Golitzin family’s (Quilceda Creek) Mach One vineyard, surrounded by a stone amphitheater in the Horse Heaven Hills AVA.

This Dispiriting Year Offered a Rare Tasting Experience

My extensive tastings of new releases from Washington from late June through November were a markedly different exercise this year: the COVID pandemic prevented me from traveling to Washington and tasting one-on-one with dozens of winemakers for the first time in 25 years. This year, I sampled about a thousand wines in my dining room in New York City as well as at a vacation home on Cape Cod in September. As a group, these wines were the best I have tasted to date from Washington. For starters, I experienced fewer cooked or oxidized wines than ever before. It was clearly easier for growers and their winery clients to avoid picking overripe grapes in 2017, 2018 and 2019 than it had been in some earlier vintages like 2014 and especially 2015.

Happily, I was able to make a virtue out of necessity: this year, I could spend as much time as I liked with the wines I tasted. Obviously, this has never been possible at my large group tastings in Seattle and Walla Walla, or in my face-to-face tastings with winemakers. This year I was able to follow almost all of the best wines for 24 to 48 hours, and sometimes even longer than that. It was a treat to be able to watch the best wines evolve in the bottle with extended aeration. This exercise was a kind of tutorial, allowing me to better identify which wines were more flash than substance and to improve my recommendations about when to drink the wines at their best.

The only real downside to this year’s atypical approach was that a few winemakers with whom I taste in Washington each year were unwilling to send samples cross-country. In some other instances, I tasted smaller selection of new releases than I might have sampled with their makers in Seattle or Walla Walla. But my communications by phone and email with dozens of winemakers provided me with considerable insight into the vintages I tasted, and I share some of their comments in my vintage notes below. 

Steep vines in Christophe Baron's Hors Categorie vineyard in the foothills of the Blue Mountains.

Early Thoughts on 2020

Two thousand twenty was a very warm growing season overall. By most accounts, the grapes largely escaped smoke taint and most of the best fruit was in before a nasty freeze arrived late in the harvest: five consecutive frosty nights beginning on Friday, October 23, with some sites experiencing frigid temps in the high teens on the nights of the 24th and 25th. As the freeze had been predicted a week in advance, most wineries were able to harvest whatever grapes were still hanging, although finding sufficient tank space was a logistical challenge for many of them. Of course, high-yielding vines that had not quite ripened their fruit by then will not produce good wines, but much of the best fruit had been harvested a week or even two before the frost. At this early stage, winemakers are very optimistic about the quality and concentration of their wines, as the growing season featured generally low crop levels, warmer total degree days than 2019 but with just a couple of heat spikes, and plenty of hang time. The wines of 2020 will be a topic for a later date.

2019 Benefitted From an Extended Cool Harvest