WIllammette Valley and 2021

Some grapes love heat. Pinot Noir is not one of them. Its thin skins and frankly finicky personality make it temperamental at best. It loves cooler days and being enveloped by fogs in the eventings and mornings.

In the US, probably no area is known more for its Pinot Noir than Willammette Valley in Oregon. Running mostly to the southwest of Portland and not far from the capital city of Salem, the valley is noted for being wedged among the various mountains of the area and close enough to the Paciific Ocean to get the cooling breezes. Many of the homes in the area don't have air conditioning as there would be at most a few days per year when you would need it and even then, that's only for a few hours per day.

And, then came the very early summer of 2021. Temperatures in the area got as high as 116F/47C. That is just brutal. It was fully 40F/22C higher than normal for the area for late June. Those poor grapes.

Just as many others do, when winemakers plan their growing seasons and harvest, they rely on their experience. One of those epxeriences is weather. So, they look to what worked for them and didn't work for them when there were similar weather patterns. So, it's simple, right. The winemakers of Willammette Valley will simply look to how they handled the last time temperatures were like this and what they got right and wrong.

Hold on. There has never been weather like this in Willammette Valley. Not in recorded history. Ever. Not even close. These temperatures broke previous records by nearly 10F/5.5C. In fact, on the hottest day od the bunch, temperatures at 8PM were still more than 30C/86F. And, where overnight lows this time of year are typically around 55F/13C, instead the poor grapes were dealing with temperatures around 80F/27C. That's nuts.

Typically, when Pinot Noir is grown in cooler weather than normal, it produces wines that show lots of bright red fruit. And, the warmer it gets, the darker the fruit gets. In addition, the warmer it gets, the faster the grapes accumulate sugar meaning the brix is higher giving the wine much more alcohol potential. 

Many Pinot Noir traditionalists used to the relatively low alcohol content of red Burgundy wines think that the wines produced from this delicate grape should never have alcohol content as high as 13 percent. This is supposed to be a gentle, yet expressive wine. 

But, nobody knows what to do with this hear. The last time it was even close was in 1981, later in growing season, and the winemakers who were producing wines then are, generally speaking not doing it 40 years later.

If one were to extrapolate all this data, we might expect some of the 2021 Willammette Valley AVA Pinot Noirs to have alcohol contents (ABV) of perhaps 15% and to exhbit lots of black fruit. Is that Pinot Noir?

We can only guess, but this will no doubt be a very strange vintage.