In the world of wine vintage is king. If you are buying a bottle of red, white or rosé then the specific year of the grape harvest is almost always written on the label.
By contrast, non-vintage still wine – that made by blending two or more years – is seen as very downmarket, something cheap and not cheerful. And it is significantly rarer.
Yet with climate change hitting vineyards around the world with more extreme weather, a small but growing number of quality-conscious wineries are releasing non-vintage bottles so they can make a more consistent wine.
Chris Howell is the winemaker at Cain Vineyard and Winery in California’s celebrated Napa Valley region, 50 miles (80km) northeast of San Francisco. He has been in the job since 1991, and he says that summers have got noticeably hotter.
“Weather is a complicated thing,” he says. “The issue people are focused on most in Napa are dramatic heat spells, heat waves that generally come throughout the summer, particularly in late summer.
“They have been around for as long as I have been here, but the peak temperatures of these are higher. The heat can be intense. You can get as high as 50C, something near to that.”
With the higher temperatures comes the increased risk of wildfires. That was the case back in 2017, when he says “tremendously intense fires” broke out in Napa in the middle of the grape harvest.
That year Mr Howell decided to only use grapes from Cain’s vineyards that had been harvested before the fires started, approximately half of the total, to prevent the risk of the smell – and taste – of smoke in the air from tainting the subsequent wines.
He says he is more “relaxed” than many winemakers would be about such a catastrophe, because he has long made a non-vintage red blend called Cain Cuvée. “So some of the wine we were able to make in 2017 was held over to be blended with that from 2018.”
Mr Howell adds that “even without fires we are now subjected to more changeable vintages. So the odds are better if you use two different vintages to create the desired style for a particular wine.”
While the world’s still wines remain mostly vintage, there is one type of wine where non-vintage blends actually dominate – sparkling wine.
