2024 Vintage -- First Take

Hello all, Diana here, writing you from Burgundy and reflecting on the 2024 Napa vintage.

This end of the season brings rest, recovery, and reflection. As the sap flows down to the roots of the vine, wine making teams kick their feet up and sift through the impressions of the vintage we just put to bed. While it is a professional pet-peeve to pigeonhole a vintage before it’s even gone through malo, in the balance, it is important to take a pause and name the defining features while they are still vivid. The Napa 2024 vintage is the most beautiful I’ve ever taken part in. Ironically, it unfolded amid the most painful slow-down in global wine sales I have ever lived through. Perhaps there is divine reason that the two should coincide.

2024 is electric. Analytically, 2024 had high malic acids, high titratable acidities, low pHs, coupled with some of the highest sugars for which I have waited.  One of the most primal, and difficult to describe features was the utter transparency and precision of the wines. There was purity that, as we tasted through our tanks, hit the plexus like a cord resonating from a perfectly tuned musical instrument.

What were the crystallization points of the vintage? What made it so special, so spectacularly harmonious? I suspect the defining moment of the vintage was the heatwave at the end of June. The timing of the heatwave, relative to the vegetative cycles, delayed the digestion of acid and the softening of skins and pulp.

Remember, the myriad of ripening indicators unfold simultaneously yet independently. Sugar is generated through photosynthesis in the leaves and shuttled into the clusters until the lignification of the peduncle. Acids are digested in the berries’ cells through respiration and progress from high to low over the season. The rest -- the evolution of tannins, phenols and flavors, berry turgor, skin softening, and seed hardening -- are all much more complicated. These ripening indicators are dictated by a dynamic web of variables including time, temperature, wind, sun light, water availability, crop load, canopy shape and more. All these individual ripening indicators are progressing throughout the growing season, accelerating or slowing at their particular pace determined by a combination of mother nature and our farming choices, up until picking. The grapes are cut from the vine and at that moment the pin-point is forever established. At the intersection you have a sugar concentration, acid concentrations, tannin and flavor evolution, etc., etc., in one, unique combination to forever define that wine.

After the late June heatwave, photosynthesis progressed optimally, and sugar accumulated efficiently. Meanwhile, all the other ripening indicators were slow to resume. The combination is novel and exciting.

I’ve come to consider that my flying away to France, leaving the wines in peace in the barrel, bung in place, was a hidden blessing for both of us.

Now I give them room to become what they will.

I do have a hunch.