As the 2023 harvest came to a close, Napa Valley Vintners declared it “The Vintage of a Lifetime.” The non-profit trade association wasn’t alone in its self-aggrandizing praise. A chorus of winemakers and industry observers echoed the superlative language. “Best ever!” exclaimed some. “Legendary!” said others. By all accounts, it was one for the ages.
But what exactly does all this hyperbole mean in real terms?
Jason Moulton, director of winemaking and viticulture at Whitehall Lane Winery in the prestigious Rutherford subregion of Napa Valley, offers up a generalized definition for such labeling: “Something extraordinary happening in a growing year, leading to perfect conditions for optimal ripeness, balance, and extraction of color, flavor, and tannin.”
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Given Moulton’s parameters and the climate timeline of Napa’s 2023 vintage, it’s hard to argue with the aforementioned grandiose declarations. A wet winter and spring rolled into a long, steadily warm summer. Replenishing splashes of rain hit at just the right moment. Hang time on the vine was very prolonged with one of the latest harvests on record, producing grapes of remarkable harmony, complexity of flavor, and little need for any sort of corrective winemaking intervention whatsoever.
The growing season was a uniquely thrown pitch: under-speed and right down the middle, just begging to be crushed out of the park.
But linguistic hyperbole is becoming the norm, even when conditions fall well short of the anomalous magnificence of examples like 2023 Napa. It’s creeping into the realm of tiresomely repetitive, with multiple global regions boasting similar proclamations seemingly every year. The constant noise now threatens to water down praise that should be reserved for truly rare outlier vintages. Compounding the issue — save for catastrophic weather events — consistently warmer vintage conditions are conspiring with modern winemaking techniques to smudge much of the distinctive definition between years.
And that undeniably justified praise for 2023 Napa? Well, it’s feeling a bit lost in the cacophony.
Too Much of a Good Thing
The obsession with certain vintages for their historical lore — say Robert Parker’s 1982 Bordeaux, the early ‘70s “Judgment of Paris” years for Napa, France’s 1945 “Victory Vintage,” and the year 2000 just for the numerical hell of it — is to be expected. It’s a perfectly healthy fixation. Even a wine novice can wrap their head around the mystique of a game-changing moment in time or a deliciously Gallic middle finger to the freshly defeated Reich. And besides, these touchstones of history come along only very seldomly.
But besides these rarities, we’ve been spoiled rotten over the past 20 years by a crate full of vintages trumpeted as legendary by the wine industry and media.
Bordeaux in 2005, 2009, and 2010: “A holy trinity.”
2011 and 2017 port: “Universally outstanding” and “magnificent,” respectively.
Napa in 2018 was “spectacular.” 2013? “Flawless.”
Numerical vintage charts — 100-point scales with attached blanket descriptors aimed at making fine-wine buying perhaps a bit too simple for the masses — are adding to the excess by now consistently ignoring almost any number below 90.
In fact, the praise coming out of Napa in particular (save the tragic fire vintages), has almost become a broken record, with ‘19, ‘18, ‘16, ‘14, ‘13, ‘12, ‘10, ‘09, ‘08, and ‘07 all weighing in at 95–100 points in one famed publication — a previously somewhat rare top honor that boasts the moniker “classic.” Likewise in northern Italy’s Piedmont, home of Barolo and Barbaresco, a full half of the past decade has been lauded with the same giddy exuberance.
Even the great Jancis Robinson, a universally revered wine writer and critic, agrees that the descriptive euphoria and race to the top for both vintage and individual wine scores is getting out of hand. “This regrettable trend makes me glad we have stuck with the 20-point scale,” says Robinson of her publication JancisRobinson.com. “Eighteen [is] a really high score.” As the extrapolated equivalent of 90 points, it’s a far cry from the nosebleed altitude now frequented by some. “It leaves us lots of room for maneuver as wine quality continues to improve — unlike those scattering 100-point scores for the last decade or two,” she says.
“Take this for what it’s worth, but I’ve always been a firm believer that not every child deserves a ribbon.”
From a producer perspective, Moulton adds that there’s a strategic marketing aspect to all the hype. “I think going after a specific growing region and hailing it as a ‘legendary vintage’ happens frequently,” he says. “In some parts of the world, I call this the whisper campaign.”
Essentially, it’s guerilla marketing, with the goal of selling more cases and elevating both global prestige and pricing. Of course, some truly rare years like Napa 2023 are indeed strikingly distinctive and bonafide outliers.
But in the grand scheme, the sugary praise now annually heralded from every corner of the winegrowing world is bound to result in some kind of psychological numbness.
Vintage Chart Abuse and Subjective Taste
Nicole Muscari, a private client sales manager and wine content creator, sees firsthand the recent inflationary trend developing a problem for the consumer. “If every vintage is declared extraordinary, then no vintage truly stands out,” she says. It seems that vintage charts — the quick and ready multitool of wine buying — are exacerbating the issue. “It’s similar to the point system for individual wines, where more and more wines receiving 90-plus points actually provides less guidance,” she says.
Descriptive restraint is now in exceedingly short supply, with an ever-shrinking moat of rare “disaster vintages” now left to defend a modicum of contextualizing contrast. “Take this for what it’s worth, but I’ve always been a firm believer that not every child deserves a ribbon,” Muscari says. Less-is-more as a concept seems to be vanishing from the wine marketing repertoire.
And yet the rudimentary utility of vintage charts is all but self-evident to both enthusiasts and serious collectors. No matter one’s personal opinion, love ‘em or hate ‘em, they serve a legitimate purpose.
“As someone in Burgundy sales, I find vintage charts can be somewhat limiting. Often, I feel like I have to help my clients ‘unlearn’ certain preconceptions they’ve formed from vintage charts to get them interested in buying wine.”
The average wine drinker wants to get the best they can for their buck, while the elite collector set requires the insider scoop on what to sock away for that high-stakes wine-and-dine or profitable resale projection. Many of us have used them (and continue to do so) for generalized context — an at-a-glance impression of what to expect from a year. Because, truthfully, the wine world has grown so vast, it’s become a fool’s errand to memorize a complete and nuanced understanding of what happened everywhere in every year. And that handy vintage chart provides an instantly useful signpost toward the right direction. “They’re small, compact, now on the interwebs, and are a great quick reference guide for purchasing when you are on the move,” says Moulton.
But modern winemaking and viticulture have grown far more sophisticated over the past century, with each passing decade expanding the producer toolbox. Extensive knowhow and technological ability now allow many to round out the rough edges of tricky years in both the vineyard and cellar. “Some vintages are [deemed] terrible due to catastrophes such as wildfires, etc., but some [producers] make great wines even in those trying circumstances,” he says. “There are definitely diamonds in the rough that can be missed if you cling to it.”
As a result, aforementioned “disaster vintages” are becoming less frequent mile markers, removing even more contrast from an already grayscale picture.
Muscari echoes the caveat, adding that, from a sales standpoint, the charts can make her job of guiding clients effectively harder. “As someone in Burgundy sales, I find vintage charts can be somewhat limiting,” she says. “Often, I feel like I have to help my clients ‘unlearn’ certain preconceptions they’ve formed from vintage charts to get them interested in buying wine.”
So while vintage charts have their place as a basic tool, they’re not the be-all and end-all many mistake them for. And with modern winemaking smoothing rough edges — and sky-high scores ever more frequent — the trusty vintage chart of old may be becoming substantially less useful.
And besides the hype inflation looming large for all to see, another issue lurks beneath:
Not everyone seeks the same thing when it comes to a particular vintage. Some folks are searching for wines that can be immediately popped and poured, while others comb the vintage landscape for bulletproof bottles to lay down for decades.
Then there’s taste. Not everyone even likes the same thing.
Someone may swoon over Napa 2012, while their friend prefers 2013. I like silky, you like structure. It’s only human. And frankly, focusing on the unique traits of a vintage — as opposed to blanket superlatives — makes the wine world more interesting anyway.
