Washington: Various Shades of Hot

BY STEPHEN TANZER | OCTOBER 26, 2017

Recent vintages in eastern Washington have run the gamut from uncomfortably warm to searing. Summer afternoon temperatures in the high desert can easily surpass 100 degrees and rainfall during the growing season is rare. But even within this string of warm years, there have been significant differences in the shape of the various growing seasons. In fact, 2015 and 2016, despite the fact that they both began with a freakishly early flowering, are quite different in style. All happy families may be alike, but each hot vintage is hot in its own way.

Following two cool growing seasons in ’10 and ’11 and a normal one in 2012, an early budbreak in 2013 ushered in a string of distinctly precocious growing seasons—with budbreak and flowering ten days to two weeks earlier than average in 2014, and two to three weeks earlier in 2015 and 2016. The trick for grape-growers in a region like eastern Washington is to get full phenolic ripeness before grape sugars skyrocket and acidity levels plunge, and this task is further complicated in an early growing season in which a significant portion of the harvest can take place in a rush during late August and early September, when afternoon temperatures can still be quite torrid. So the objective of growers and wineries who purchase their fruit is to push the harvest back a bit in order to take advantage of cooler weather, which almost invariably arrives in eastern Washington in September—and sometimes quite abruptly, as it did in 2013 and again this year during the middle of that month. (Longer hang time per se is not necessarily the objective, as more and more growers in Washington associate extended time on the vines with overripe aromas, but obviously in many instances it is beneficial to skin ripeness and flavor development of the grapes.)

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Washington State AVA Map courtesy of Washington State Wine. Click for interactive version

In the introduction to my coverage of Washington last November, I provided a detailed description of a number of vineyard management techniques growers have adopted to respond to the challenges posed by hot growing seasons. These include: pruning for a larger crop, at least during the first half of the growing season, in order to slow ripeness, careful hedging of the vines to slow down photosynthesis while simultaneously protecting the grapes from the hottest afternoon sunshine, and seeking out cooler and higher-altitude sites for new plantings. In recent years these measures have been essential to making balanced wines that avoid cooked flavors, and with each passing year the state’s growers and winemakers have a larger experience base to draw on in hot vintages.

The 2015 Growing Season and Wines

In the course of my winery visits in Walla Walla and my extensive tastings in Seattle this summer and in the past few weeks in New York, I got a good look at the extravagantly ripe, rich 2015 reds, from the hottest vintage ever recorded in eastern Washington’s winelands. Average GDDs (Growing Degree Days) across the Columbia Valley were about 20% higher than the norm — a huge increment. Due to the early-season heat, berry size was typically small, setting the stage for a crop of highly concentrated, powerful, tannic wines. It was then steadily hot through the growing season (with an extended heat wave — longer than two weeks — in late June and early July) and the harvest start was the earliest to date, with some wineries beginning in mid-August. Even normally cool vineyards ripened weeks earlier than they normally do. Not surprisingly, most winemakers agree that cooler and higher-altitude sites were especially favored in 2015, as they ripened fully and benefited from longer hang time during a year in which the harvest was generally compressed. Some growers were overwhelmed by the extreme season and the small crop of quickly ripening grapes.