Critics are paid for pronouncements, so here we go: the 2023 vintage in the Napa Valley looks like one of the finest in decades. The wines are not yet released. Many are not even out of barrel. But already the vintage is garnering praise verging on hyperbole. John Williams, proprietor of Frog’s Leap Winery and vintage veteran of 40-plus years in Napa, tells me, unbidden, “Potentially, it’s the vintage of the century.” Williams’s son Rory, director of operations at Frog’s Leap, isn’t as prone to superlatives as his father, but he’s grateful nonetheless. “Thank goodness for no unwelcome surprises,” he says. 

I’m leery of “great”, or any words synonymous with “greatness.” (As for “Vintage of the Century”—sez who? How old are you, anyway?) Too often superlatives carry with them a whiff of embellishment, or bullshit. So let’s set aside the greatness of the 2023 vintage in Napa for a moment to point out this: the vintage could very well represent an inflection point in how vintages are appreciated in Napa and in the rest of California. That’s because 2023 happens to be one of the coolest of this century—and so to speak of greatness in a cool vintage, in a region where warm vintages were routinely championed, feels like a kind of insurgency. 

Warm vintages get all the love. When Robert Parker Jr. declared 1982 in Bordeaux to be great, for example, it was because the vintage was generous, and the wines were so welcoming when young. No one back then believed his assertions that they’d age, which they have done exceedingly well. 

In Napa critics tended to apply the same calculus, declaring hot vintages like 1990,1996, 1997, and 2001 stellar. Cool vintages, like 2010 and 2011, were greeted warily; only in hindsight were those vintages considered something other than “off.” (That’s more true for 2010 than 2011, which was so difficult that winemakers will tend not to show them, no matter how good they are in the glass.) 

There have been El Niño vintages (1998), and there have been weird vintages (2015), and there have been disastrous vintages (2020), but in Napa a great vintage was often one which conveyed power. The region’s late-season, post-veraison heat waves typically oblige. But in 2023, the temperatures stayed cool for the duration of the season, with even ripening the result. Sugars and mature flavors were in sync, the wines had vibrancy and drive. That is how the emphasis has shifted, at least for now: Napa will always be a power source, but freshness is not only possible, it’s championed. 

“Usually, by June 30th, I can tell within days when we’re going to harvest,” says Ivo Jeramaz, head winemaker for Napa’s Grgich Hills Estate of his 38th vintage. “I say this all the time: you can’t gain back from cooler months. If I’m driving from Napa to Los Angeles and the speed limit is 60 miles per hour, then it’s going to take how long it’s going to take. You can’t recover; that’s the way the plant physiology works.” 

Rory Williams agrees, advancing the driving metaphor. “The days were warm but not hot, the nights cold, nothing raced.” A steady pace, in other words. “There were no major slowdowns or speed bumps,” he says, “just a country drive to harvest. You could get off at whatever exit you wanted, and be happy where you ended up.”

“The fruit had as much time as it needed to mature,” says Clos du Val’s Carmel Greenberg of 2023, her 14th Napa Valley vintage. “And it definitely took its time.” She notes, the quality was superb. “I remember sorting, thinking I’d never seen such visually perfect fruit. Usually in the fall we get one or two heat spikes, and the fruit starts to dimple, or raisin. We had almost none of that.”

“Everything got ripe, but not overripe,” says Jeramaz. “It was cool enough for the plants and the berries to hold more water. When you hit your maximum ripeness you get high sugars and good berry weights, with a Brix of 23 degrees. [Typically, that number would convert to about 13.7% ABV.] “To get to 24 Brix you have to resort to dehydration, but there wasn’t any; the cluster weights stayed the same. In fact, we had to delay picking because the acids were high.”

Good acidity and no dehydration means wines of tension and nerve. “This vintage feels very youthful,” says Rebekah Wineburg of Quintessa. “You have freshness of fruit, the acids are there, but it’s all about density and tannin structure. When I taste them now the wines feel inward focused. It’s like the 2018s, also a cooler year. Even now if you taste a 2018 and a 2019 side by side, the 2018 is going to seem younger. That’s the way the ‘23s are going to be, for years, against other vintages.” 

Hopefully they’ll be a model going forward for what Napa will consider great vintages. And maybe I’ll even get comfortable using that word again.