There are no easy vintages – and that was especially true in Chile this year. The widespread drought that has been affecting the country for several years – and the forecast of a dry and hot summer – indicated that 2023 would be a challenging year.
But in mid-January the situation dramatically worsened, with voracious fires in Maule, Ñuble, Itata and Bío Bío, where more than 50,000ha of forests were devastated. The fire took towns, vineyards, wineries and at least 24 human lives in its wake. A tragedy.
The final balance estimates that 600 small wine producers were affected, with losses of some 470ha of vines. Most of those vines were centenarian and an irreplaceable part of Chile’s ancestral wine heritage.
Meanwhile, what was left standing was overtaken by smoke and ash. Producers today are evaluating the effect of smoke taint on the wines they have made. They are also looking to the future, in hope of preserving the winemaking traditions of a region with five centuries of history.
Record heatwaves
The high summer temperatures made 2023 one of the hottest vintages of the last 70 years. This meant that viticultural teams had to work particularly hard to determine the right time to harvest the grapes. However, beyond the hard data and readings from the meteorological stations, this vintage is turning out to be more nuanced than expected, with each valley behaving differently.
‘I’ve never seen so many variations in the same year. The vineyards on the coast had a quite different year to those in the Andes and the Central Valley, which are a long way from the sea,’ said Marcelo Papa, winemaker and technical director at Concha y Toro.
‘While in Limarí we had fewer degree days and plenty of cloud, in Maipo we experienced higher temperatures for sustained periods and the harvest had to be brought forward 10 days,’ he added.
Best to start at the beginning, however, and Héctor Rojas, agricultural engineer at Tabalí, is a great help with that. ‘The 2022 winter was especially cold with more rainfall, as much as 140mm in Limari – the average is between 60 and 80mm – and 380mm in Maipo,’ he explained.
‘Then we had a cold spring that notably held back some of the phenological development, together with vigorous leaf growth thanks to the wet soils after the rainy winter. But, very abruptly, from the end of December onwards and throughout January, we saw a sustained rise in temperatures that shook the plants out of their lethargy and rapidly accelerated ripening. It was a year that kept you on your toes.’
Shrinking harvest windows
Because of the hot summer temperatures, the harvest windows shrunk. Some varieties were ripening at the same time, when generally this occurs weeks apart. Of course, this presented a logistical challenge and good coordination between the teams in the field and in the winery was crucial.
Viviana Navarrete, chief winemaker at Viña Leyda, explained: ‘In the Leyda Valley, the harvest began slowly, delayed by 12 to 14 days compared to the 2022 season. It was difficult to get the grapes to build up enough Brix. Sugar accumulation in the grapes was slow, accompanied by high acidity that remained until the end.’
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