WA 2024 wine grape season started late and wet. Now it’s called a ‘pivotal year’

Every winemaker is seemingly an optimist when a new harvest’s wine grapes begin to arrive on the crush pad in late summer and throughout the fall. For 2024, that optimism seems especially merited.

“I don’t remember a September-October that was comparable” to 2024, says the dean of the Mid-Columbia’s winemakers, Rob Griffin of Barnard Griffin Winery in Richland.

Considering that his memory now stretches back to the grapes that came in nearly five decades ago during the 1977 harvest at the now-defunct Preston Wine Cellars north of Pasco, that’s high praise indeed.

Both the white grapes and the red grapes of 2024 promise exceptional character, he believes. The year did not start out that way. The spring was late and wet, not an auspicious start for wine grapes.

Through June, the weather was cooler than normal, but July abruptly got hot, with high temperatures above 100 degrees starting the week of July 4. The rest of the month was the second hottest July ever recorded at the Hanford weather station.

Over the summer, many of the white wine vines damaged by a cold spring and hard winter conditions, were recovering, reported Victor Palencia, owner of his eponymous Palencia Wine Co. and Monarcha, the two lines of wines he makes from his operation in the Columbia Gardens Wine & Artisan Village on Kennewick’s Columbia Drive.

By the middle of August, the wine grapes were back on a more normal schedule, with the earliest white wines, such as Sauvignon Blanc, coming in toward month’s end. The result was that the new white wines are showing exceptional varietal character, Griffin and Palencia agreed.

“We were thinking it was going to be a low crop,” Palencia said, “but everything ripened very consistently. The aromatics are really beautiful.”

He’s especially impressed with what he’s seeing in the fermentations of two of his signature whites, Albariño and Sauvignon Blanc.

During many harvest seasons, grape growers and winemakers fret whether their late- ripening reds, such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot, will get fully ripe before an early hard frost strips the leaves from the vines and halts any more ripening. But this fall was an early harvest in the region.

Reid Klei, winemaker for McKinley Springs Winery, which in June opened a new tasting room on Bradley Boulevard in Richland, reported in mid-October that the much of the Cab and Petit Verdot from the Horse Heaven Hills AVA already was coming in.

“People are really going gangbusters,” he said. He was practically gushing about the quality of the red wine grapes he has been crushing. He praised Justin Andrews, part of the Andrews family that owns McKinley Springs’ roughly 2,300 acres of wine grapes in the Horse Heavens, for producing “amazing fruit.”

The three winemakers, with their 90-plus total years of winemaking experience, work with wine grapes from as far north as Quincy, as far south as the Oregon side of the Columbia River, as far east as Walla Walla and as far west as the Cascade foothills.

Klei said the summer and fall had produced a crop of red grapes in the Horse Heaven Hills AVA with berries that tended to be smaller, but fully ripe. The result has been grapes with fully ripe tannins and a higher ratio of skin to juice, which gives the wines more character and color— nothing green about them. He believes those grapes will produce excellent wines with great varietal character.

Palencia said he’s especially pleased with the red grapes from his Red Mountain AVA estate vineyard off Demoss Road near Benton City. All its red vines are from the Rhône varietals, Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre.

“This will be my 24th year” of winemaking, he said. “We’re very excited.”

His enthusiasm is prompting him to make two styles of Mourvèdre. One will be a traditional Rhône style — with dark, earthy fruit flavors and aromas. The other, he said, will be more in the style of a Spanish Monastrell, typically a full-bodied, meaty wine with luscious fruit flavors of black cherry and blackberry.

He called 2024 a “pivotal year,” in which he expects the region’s up-and-coming winemakers he’s met will be trying out new winemaking ideas and working with new wine varieties.

“I’m excited to how the ideas and wines grow up together,” he said.

In the opening months of 2025, when the new crop’s white and rosé wines begin to be released, consumers will begin to find out what 2024 produced. Most of the reds will start arriving in the spring of 2026.

Ken Robertson is the retired executive editor of the Tri-City Herald and has been writing about Northwest wines since 1978.