Easy-Drinking Reds from a Scorching Napa Vintage

A wine marketing slogan decades ago boasted that “every year is a vintage year in California.” While that is technically true – the wineries do make wine every year – the sense of that slogan is not.

For all its sunshine and cool, breezy evenings, California can hardly guarantee that every year will be a picnic, even in picturesque Napa Valley. 2020 was decimated by wildfire smoke; 2021 was a tiny, drought vintage but high quality; 2022, the main focus of this report, was marred by a heat event the likes of which few if any winemakers in the history of the world have faced.

The week of blistering weather in 2022 began in early September, just as the valley’s famous cabernet sauvignon crop was approaching a good level of ripeness for harvest. Chris Cooney, the vineyard director for Realm Cellars, repeatedly used the word “challenging” to politely describe the horrific harvest conditions.

Realm Cellars saw a high of 117 degrees Fahrenheit (47 Celsius) at the Farella Vineyard in the normally cool Coombsville district, and 123 degrees at two Rutherford district weather stations. These are Death Valley numbers, not Napa Valley numbers.

Temps of 100, 105 and sometimes 110 degrees have occurred here before but they usually last only one to three days at a time. This event, called a “heat dome” by meteorologists, continued for a week, peaking around Sept. 6, when the city of Napa recorded its highest temperature ever, 115 degrees.

Every Napa winemaker we spoke with this year while tasting more than 1,400-plus cabernet sauvignons, red blends and other reds shared similar observations.

When winemaker Maya Dalla Valle at her family’s namesake eastside Oakville vineyard saw a forecast for 115 degrees, she turned on water misters distributed throughout the vines that exude cooling moisture to lower the air temperature in the grapevine canopies by 10 degrees.

Our assumption when we began tasting 2022s was to expect wines with overripe, dried-fruit flavors and soft, flabby mouthfeels as in late-harvest zinfandels. The wines should taste cooked, raisiny and extreme, right?

Not right, as it turned out. Very few of the 2022s we tasted were seriously flawed. A high percentage were enjoyable, fruity, relatively light in tannin and color and easy to drink. The best offered a degree of freshness and charm that doesn’t seem to make sense until you look at the chemistry in the grapes.

But first let’s preview the overall results that you’ll see below in extensive tasting notes.

Many 2022 Napa cabernet sauvignons from top vineyards and wineries earned scores just one to two points lower than they did in the lush and concentrated 2019 vintage, which is also a year that’s enjoyable young but with better aging potential.

Of the 920-plus Napa 2022 reds tasted by James Suckling, Senior Editor Jim Gordon, Associate Editor Ryan Montgomery and other staff tasters, several dozen earned scores of 96 and above.

The Opus One Napa Valley 2022, for example, is a gorgeous, full, spicy Bordeaux-style blend that’s balanced and fresh-tasting.

“I don’t want to be flippant and say it wasn’t difficult,” said Opus One’s chief winemaker, Michael Silacci. “It was what it was. Every vintage for us is just the reality right here [on the Opus One property in Oakville]. We have a real opportunity to deal with it.”

Silacci said Opus’s full-time vineyard team began harvesting merlot estate grapes on Aug. 24, 2022. They then started picking cabernet sauvignon Sept. 2, just before the heat dome began, and worked right through it, finishing the harvest on Sept. 24.

“We pick early in general, to capture the fresh fruit flavors that we want and also the acidity. it’s a sin here to have to add acidity,” Silacci said. “We want to stay in the fresh- to ripe-fruit zone, before the riper blueberry and plum flavors develop.”

Only one wine from Napa’s 2022 vintage, the Colgin Cellars Napa Valley IX Estate 2022, received a perfect score in this report, but it is well-deserved. “I’m speechless about this one,” James said of it. “It’s full-bodied and tannic, with the intensity that Napa wines achieve in hot vintages, yet it remains tense and blue-fruited, showing that it’s a mountain red that was not affected by the extreme weather of the vintage.”

Almost as compelling were a handful of other Napa standouts. Keplinger’s Napa Valley Oakville Vine Hill Ranch 2022 is quite atypical for the vintage, with a focused structure and a real drive in the flavors. The Futo Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Stags Leap District 5500 Estate 2022 is fragrant in dried flowers and blackberries with hints of fresh herbs, currants and mint. The magnificent Lokoya Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Mount Veeder 2022 is built for long-term aging, with the intensity and tannin of a Pauillac.

Dozens of other highly rated 2022s listed below show how well vineyard crews and winemakers sorted out the good grapes from the bad, using technology and experience that was not available in previous decades to avert what could have been a disaster and make hundreds of good, drinkable Napa reds.

Wines that appeared to suffer from the heat split into two camps. One group gave up rather lean, crisp red-fruit flavors, thin mid-palates and short finishes, and the other oozed flavors of bruised or baked fruit, with smoky and meaty flavors.

Thirty 2022s scored under 90 points and are not highly recommended to buy.

Yet our overall advice is not to fear buying the 2022s if you can find them priced at a bearable level. With California wine sales slowing in general and the loss of Canada as an export market due to tariffs, prices for Napa cabernet are soft now. Many wines are being offered at discounts, wait lists for cultish cabernet sauvignons are shorter and signs along Highway 29 and Silverado Trail reading “Walk-ins welcome” are common.

This new vintage still brings the big flavors and velvety tannins for which Napa is famous. Just don’t expect them to be miraculous at 20 or 30 years.

A smart strategy now if you’re building a cellar full of ageworthy classics is to take advantage of the top-rated 2021s still available from many properties. These are more concentrated, deeper and more complex than most 2022s, and they were made in smaller quantities due to the extreme drought conditions in 2021.

Take a look at the best, late-release 2021s below, topped by the perfect-scoring Bryant Family Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 2021, an especially impressive wine from a highly rated year.

Near the top of the 2021 results are great wines from Dana Estates, J.H. Wheeler, Outpost Wines, Paul Hobbs and Shafer Vineyards. Also check last year’s Napa Valley report for more recommendations.

'Better in the Bottle'

The danger to wine quality from an extended heat event like the 2022 harvest is mainly that high temperatures and cloudless skies can shrivel and dehydrate grapes that are already ripe and stun the vines’ metabolism so that unripe grapes stay unripe, with green flavors.

Wine color can be lighter; tannins can be leaner. Heat above about 105 degrees effectively stuns a  grapevine’s system, closing the tiny stomata in the leaves that take in carbon dioxide and stopping the ripening process in the grapes.

This heat system attacked when the grapes in Napa and many other parts of the state were still relatively high in acid content and not yet as sweet or physically mature (soft skins and brown seeds) as winemakers wanted. Which explains the crisp red fruit impressions of some wines made from grapes that were harvested mid heat.

Winemaker Kristy Melton at Freemark Abbey in St. Helena said she produced only half the usual quantity of red wines, due to damaged fruit in the vineyard and severe selection at the winery before fermentation.

“Tannins and color are heat sensitive, but we had almost forgotten that until 2022,” she said. “If you did the work and paid attention to details, they turned out pretty and fun. The wines are getting better in the bottle, more floral, red fruit character and the textures seamless.”

The Freemark Abbey Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Rutherford Sycamore Vineyard 2022 tastes remarkably sleek, sophisticated and linear.

Another issue at some wineries was the unusually high proportion of fructose to sucrose sugar in the juice. Winemaker Paul Hobbs, whose Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Coombsville Nathan Coombs Estate 2022 is a jaw-dropping example of how good a wine from the troubled 2022 vintage can be, explained the challenge. “At 100 degrees or more the vines push out a lot more fructose, which is hard to ferment,” Hobbs said. “So there were many stuck fermentations. Normally we rely on all indigenous yeast but in 2022 we had to restart fermentations, adding a strain of commercial, fructophilic [fructose-loving] yeast to continue.

“Fructose is usually irrelevant. Now we know this very well, so we are armed. But in 2003 and 2004 we didn’t know what it was,” he said, adding that Napa’s 2003 vintage may be the closest in character to 2022.  Other winemakers mentioned 2015 and 2016 in this vein.

Echoing Melton at Freemark Abbey, Hobbs said that phenolics, the major color and flavor components in the grape skins, measured 20 to 25 percent below normal because of the enormous heat event. “Even when the fruit was pretty intact, it was altered by the heat," he said. "Shifting the flavors from darker fruit to more red fruit.”

Several winemakers stressed the relative success of cabernet franc over cabernet sauvignon in 2022, either in varietal wines or red wine blends.

“I think the cabernet franc and petit verdot were really valuable additions in our estate wine,” said Natalie Bath, the winemaker at Rudd Estate in Oakville. “Franc is a little more vigorous, allowing two to three clusters per shoot, and the acid seems a little higher. The canopy provides more shade and yet the heat helped soften the skins.”

“I saw 118 here on our temperature probe, and I think at 118 the vines are just stressed beyond functioning,” she added. “You’re not going to see much more development of sugar or phenolics.”

As with many high-end vineyards, Rudd Estate used shade cloth and misters to help protect their vines. Like the mist machines used in outside dining areas of restaurants to cool the air, they can have a dramatic effect.

The Rudd Napa Valley Oakville Estate 2022 is full of dark fruit and sweet oak spices. “It worked out really, really well to be honest,” Bath said. “But if you had asked me in the middle of harvest, I don’t know that I would have been so confident.”

– Jim Gordon, Executive Editor

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.

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