The Washington Reset: High Quality and Hard Truths in the 2023 & 2024 Vintages
The Washington Reset: High Quality and Hard Truths in the 2023 & 2024 Vintages
By Jeremy Young
Washington wine country sits mostly in the rain shadow of the Cascades, dry and continental, where summer days can hit triple digits and winter cold can drop a vineyard to its knees in hours. It’s not an easy place. But it produces some of the most compelling Cabernet, Syrah, and Riesling in the country, and when the season behaves, you see why people got obsessed with it in the first place.
The last few years haven’t always behaved. The 2021 heat dome compressed harvest into a frantic sprint. The 2022 cold snap, followed by an unusually warm October, produced what one longtime Yakima Valley grower called a vintage of “three extremes.” So when 2023 rolled in with nothing dramatic to report, growers were almost suspicious.
The vintage lived up to its promise.
The 2023 Vintage
Bud break in 2023 ran about two weeks late, then May arrived hot, and the vines sprinted. Bloom across the Columbia Valley happened around May 22nd, within days of recent hot vintages, despite the slow start. One grower described watching the fastest vine development of his career. From there, June ran warm, veraison came in slightly ahead of the 10-year average, and a brief heat spike in mid-August, three days of triple digits across the valley, was the season’s one real test. The vines passed it. September and October were moderate and dry, giving winemakers the kind of extended hang time that separates a good Washington year from a genuinely great one.
Total harvest: around 159,000 tons, down 34% from 2022. The crop was small partly by design, partly by cold damage from a December 2022 freeze that hit some appellations hard. Lake Chelan was the worst affected. But small crops with late-season hang time is essentially Washington’s formula for excellence, and 2023 fits it cleanly.
The reds have structure and color, the whites have precision and lift. Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier came out particularly well, the former showing more focus than the variety often manages in warmer years, the latter carrying the stony, savory character that defines the best expressions from The Rocks District. 2023 Syrah across the board is worth paying attention to.
The 2024 Vintage
January 2024 brought a genuine scare. Temperatures in eastern Walla Walla dropped to negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit, and growers didn’t yet know how bad the damage was. What made it stranger: hillside sites that should’ve been protected from frost actually took the worst of it, because a temperature inversion trapped cold air at elevation. Red Mountain largely avoided it. Parts of Walla Walla didn’t.
Spring was cool. The growing season built slowly, heat accumulation tracking only slightly above historical averages through most of the summer despite a warm July and a brief August surge. Veraison came in a few days late. Harvest started a few days late. And then the finishing weather, September into October, was, by multiple accounts, close to ideal.
Red Mountain’s Tyler Williams at Kiona described it as ripe and powerful, with freshness intact, the kind of vintage where you don’t have to choose between concentration and acidity. Marcus Rafanelli at L’Ecole No. 41 noted higher-than-average acids and exceptional structure for both reds and whites. The winemakers who lost crop to the January freeze weren’t thrilled about the quantity, but they were largely pleased with what they got.
Total harvest was 150,000 tons, the lowest since 2011. Red varieties down 10%, whites up slightly. Average price per ton rose for the second consecutive year. Cabernet Sauvignon held firm at 27% of total production.
The State of the Union
Two strong vintages in a row ought to feel like a moment of confidence. And for the small producers making 5,000 cases or fewer, who make up roughly 90% of Washington’s wineries, there’s real momentum. Direct-to-consumer sales grew 5% between 2022 and 2023, and some wineries kept that pace through 2024. The $30-and-up tier is where Washington is actually gaining ground nationally.
The structural picture is harder to look at.
Washington peaked at around 60,000 acres under vine in 2019. It’s now at 50,000 and falling. Industry insiders put the floor somewhere around 40,000 acres before this contraction levels off. Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, which for decades crushed more than half the state’s grapes, began cutting grower contracts by 40% in 2023. The ripple effects have been severe: Columbia Crest scaled back, Col Solare sold off, 14 Hands shuttered its crush pad. Canvasback, Duckhorn Portfolio’s Washington label, closed altogether. The state’s wine marketing budget dropped from $6.1 million in 2022 to $4.1 million in 2024, which is a travesty in my opinion.
Growers holding contracts with Ste. Michelle found themselves, in some cases, locked under NDAs and unable to speak publicly about what was happening to their businesses. Those who could speak described a scramble to find new buyers, sometimes late in the season, sometimes for fruit already on the vine.
There’s a case to be made that this correction was due. Blocks infected with leafroll virus and other diseases were kept in production for years because contracted income made it easier to farm through the problems than fix them. Some of that ground is coming out now, and when it gets replanted, it’ll be with better thinking about what variety belongs where.
White wines deserve more attention than they’ve historically gotten here. Riesling from Columbia Valley sites can age incredibly well. Washington Semillon, which nearly disappeared, is being revived by a handful of producers who remember what it was capable of. The Viogniers, Marsanne, and Grenache Blanc from The Rocks are singular. And Chardonnay, which is rarely the thing people come to Washington for, is getting more serious winemaking attention than it used to, with a few 100-point scores from other critics in the past two years.
Older vintages still worth opening: 2019 is in a good window right now, especially for Cabernet and Syrah. The 2018s are concentrated and built to age. The 2017s, which started with a cool spring and finished with longer hang time than expected, show a leaner, more precise profile that’s aged gracefully.
Two good vintages won’t fix an industry in the midst of a painful reset. But they’re the right argument for why Washington wine, done right, is worth the effort to find.