IT'S A MIRACLE

As winemakers everywhere understandably praise the vintage they're currently selling, JamesSuckling.com doesn't begrudge Oregon winemakers their preternatural characterisation of the 2022 harvest.

- Words: JIM GORDON

Winemakers everywhere understandably declare that the vintage they're currently selling is of “great quality”, “exceptional” or “distinctive”.

In fact, they use the term “vintage of the century” suspiciously often in some of the world’s particularly confident appellations.

So we don't begrudge Oregon winemakers their characterisation of the 2022 harvest in the American northwest as a miracle vintage. In fact, our tasting notes and scores offer plenty of evidence that's it’s an excellent, high-quality year. Twenty-four pinot noirs we tasted rated 96 points and higher, and one 2022 chardonnay earned a nearly perfect score.

Yet what made the year miraculous wasn’t so much its consistently high quality, but it’s dramatic, perhaps unprecedented recovery from devastating weather conditions in the springtime. Bitter, freezing temperatures killed new-growing grapevine shoots and the tiny, infant grape clusters on them in large swaths of the Willamette Valley, which sits in the northwestern part of the state.

Grapevines keep trying, however, and eventually they pushed out new shoots and clusters.

“The secondary buds didn’t come out for four to six weeks after the freeze,” said winemaker Brian Laing of Hazelfern Cellars. But would the vines get an extra month or more in the autumn to ripen this second crop before the usual cold and wet weather set in?

“We were afraid in 2022 that we wouldn't even get the fruit ripe, but in the end I think we got more ripeness than in '21,” Laing told us. Winemaker after winemaker said that the way the late summer and autumn weather favoured them was amazing.

Ian Lombard, co-founder of Rose & Arrow Estate, which made numerous pinot noirs scoring 96 and above in that vintage, said 2022 was “miraculous. It was a cooler year even after the frost. Everything was delayed. But we got a warm dry Indian summer in September that extended until almost the end of October.