My ears perk up with excitement when I hear of cool, extended growing seasons in any region. So, how did Washington State producers fare in the idiosyncratic 2022 vintage? Success wasn’t easy to come by, but it also wasn’t unattainable.

The smoke-plagued 2020 vintage produced wines that are significantly better than originally expected. By comparison, the 2021s show the effects of unrelenting heat and a compressed season. Despite those challenges, top producers found balance in creating opulent wines that will please a broad audience.

Leonetti remains one of the leading producers of Bordeaux blends, not just in Washington State, but worldwide. Gary and Chris Figgins joined me for a tasting of twenty-one vintages of their Red Wine Reserve for this vertical.

It’s about time Rhône varieties in Washington State receive the recognition they deserve. In addition to high-quality producers making wines that can compete with established global benchmarks, I found a surge in unique, terroir-driven and unforgettable reds of the highest caliber on my most recent trip to the region.

In the face of many challenges, Washington State winemakers are working hard to prove the quality of their wines and terroir. Battling the conditions of the 2020 vintage is just the tip of the iceberg. This is winemaking in the extreme.

There are very few wines that I personally seek out year after year. For a wine to become a recurring purchase for my cellar, it takes a proven track record, unparalleled quality among. peers, vintage-to-vintage consistency and. relative value. The Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon is such a wine, even with steady price increase over the past ten years.

My inaugural Washington report for Vinous focuses on the exceptional 2018 vintage, as well as some bottlings from 2019 and a smattering of 2020s. Of these vintages, red and white wines from 2018 stand tall among the others and complete what is arguably the finest lineup of Washington wines in the last 20 years.

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.

DeLille Cellars’ Chaleur Blanc has been Washington State’s most consistently brilliant white wine since the mid-2000s. It has achieved an exceptional track record for longevity over a quarter-century of production, as this vertical back to 1995 showed.

A trio of superb vintages and a glut of grapes have combined to give wine lovers the best chance yet to enjoy outstanding values from Washington.

Washington has experienced an unbroken succession of six very warm to hot years, but by now the state’s most serious growers and winemakers have proven that they can stand the heat. While there are underperformers in Washington, at the level of the better wineries quality has never been higher than it is today.

Washington’s recent streak of hot years has yielded an unprecedented number of outstanding wines. But each of these vintages has come with its own set of challenges.

Christophe Baron’s adventures in Walla Walla Valley quickly bore fruit. Since the turn of the new century his wines — especially his Syrahs — have consistently stood out from the crowd in Washington State. Baron’s Bionic Frog bottling is the best of them, as a comprehensive recent vertical tasting made clear.

The recent string of extra-hot years has forced Washington State’s growers and winemakers to respond proactively to extreme conditions. But the most successful players have been able to harvest strong raw materials and produce seriously rich, balanced wines.

The Poet’s Leap Riesling, the only white wine made under the Long Shadows umbrella, has been an unfailing crowd pleaser—not to mention remarkably consistent in quality—since its first vintage in 2003.

Two thousand twelve brought a return to normal—not too hot, not too cold . . . just right. This “perfectly average vintage,” as a number of growers described it, was also Washington’s easiest in many years, both in the vineyards and in the wineries.

The more I taste the better 2011 red wines from Washington State, the more excited I become about this vintage—and the more I wonder whether the warmest areas within the Columbia Valley’s high desert are just too hot in some years to make elegant, naturally balanced wines.

Wine lovers who stopped following Washington's wines may hardly recognize what the state is up to these days

If Washington State's top producers are indeed aiming to make wines of greater finesse, as is the trend nowadays across much of the New World, their efforts have been facilitated by a pair of back-to-back cooler growing seasons in 2010 and 2011

If you're an inveterate Francophile when it comes to structured red wines and have always been skeptical of those upstarts in Washington State, the 2008 vintage offers a perfect opportunity to give these wines a shot

As 2007 by now has gained a reputation as one of Washington’s most outstanding and complete vintages of the past generation, this vintage from the state’s better producers has sold well, even in this moribund economy.

If this year’s coverage of new releases from Washington State is longer than ever before, that’s because there are more wines worthy of your notice than previously

At a time when some of Washington’s most thoughtful winemakers are considering how they might make ripe, satisfying wines at lower alcohol levels, recent vintages have brought a return to more normal conditions following the 2003-2005 trio of very warm years

While Washington’s 2007 crop of wines will be covered in depth over the next year or three, it’s not too early to say that this vintage will be tricky in spots, due to rainy, cooler weather during the latter half of the harvest, which may have affected the later-ripening cabernet

Washington State has enjoyed a succession of warm vintages in recent years, and it's quite likely that 2005 will turn out to be the best of them