All it takes are gray skies and a little more rain than usual and the wine press panics. Taking the Chicken Little approach to winegrowing, the sky-is-falling stories soon start to appear. Perhaps this is understandable as bad news sells better than good. Thankfully, the winegrowers themselves have much cooler heads. Cooler heads like Adelsheim’s excellent winemaker David Paige in the article below:

Wines & Vines - News Headlines - Northwest Vineyards Off to a Cool Start

David Paige notes, “We’re not at the point where anybody should be declaring disaster,” he said. “If we do our jobs, we are going to be absolutely fine. And if we get all the wrong weather, we’ll probably still be fine—as long as we’re on top of it.”

The wine press seems to still operate with a 70’s mentality, which is the last time a major wine region suffered vintages that produced commercially unsalable wine like Barolo and Bordeaux in 1972. The fact is that enology and viticulture have advanced so far since those days that vintages like that will not occur again. Every year producers can make at the minimum good wines. The only question vintage offers any more is how hard they’ll have to work and how good the wines will be.

For great reds today, the only rating necessary is if they’re ready to drink young or not. It’s quite nice of Mother Nature to mix vintages that need aging with those ready to drink young.