Does the year matter? More than the name, and now in Napa too.

Short answer: the question is whether the year on the label matters, and the answer is that it matters more than the château on a $30 Bordeaux, more than the score on a $60 Napa Cabernet, and not at all on a $10 bottle that says California, and the reasons differ by region. In the cool places a bad year is cold and wet and the wine is thin; in the warm places a bad year is a fire or a heat spike and the wine is cooked. Both show in the vintage charts, which run from 84 to 99 for Bordeaux and for Napa over the same fourteen years, and neither shows on the price tag, because the shelf prices the name and not the year. That gap is where the money is. A 2022 Médoc at $25 beside a 2021 Médoc at $25 is the same price for two different wines. Take the 2022 every time.

What a year does

Grapes are a crop, and a crop is weather. A team at Oxford put seventy years of Bordeaux scores against seventy years of local weather and found the pattern plain: the best vintages followed cool, wet winters, warm springs, hot dry summers and cool dry autumns, and the lead author put it in five words: “Weather drives wine quality and wine taste.” The worst years are the ones the pattern breaks. Frost in April and rain in September gave Burgundy a 2021 crop nearly half its normal size and thin reds to go with it. In 2024 spring and summer rain ran double the norm, and Gevrey-Chambertin and Chablis brought in a fifth of a normal crop, though the whites, the critics say, are terrific. That last clause is the kind of thing a vintage chart tells you and a price tag never will.

Two charts, one lesson

Wine Spectator scores each region’s vintages out of 100, and the two charts everyone should carry are Bordeaux’s left bank and Napa Cabernet. Here is Bordeaux, 2010 to 2023: 99, 91, 88, 84, 93, 94, 97, 91, 96, 93, 93, 84, 95, 90. The 84s are 2013, cold and wet, and 2021, frost and rain. The 99 is 2010; the 97 is 2016; the 95 is 2022.

Now Napa, the same years: 96, 88, 96, 97, 95, 94, 98, 92, 99, 96, 87, 97, 84, 95. The 84 is 2022, a heat wave over Labor Day that cooked grapes still on the vine. The 87 is 2020, heat and wildfire smoke, a year in which many estates did not release a wine at all. The 88 is 2011, rain at harvest. The 99 is 2018; the 97s are 2013 and 2021.

Read the two together. The old rule said the year matters in Europe, where it rains, and not in California, where it does not. The charts say the swing is identical, fifteen points, and only the villain has changed. Bordeaux’s bad years are cold; Napa’s are catastrophes. If anything the Napa chart is the more important one to know, because a thin Bordeaux tastes thin and tells you so, while a smoke-touched Cabernet can taste fine for the first glass and like an ashtray on the second, and it is sold at full price under a famous name.

Where it matters most, and least

Most: anywhere the grape struggles to ripen, Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Loire, Germany, Piedmont, Oregon, and now, for the opposite reason, anywhere that burns or bakes: Napa, Sonoma, the south of Australia. In these places the year is the single most useful fact on the label, and it is also the one the retailer is least likely to price: the shop pays the same for the 2021 and the 2022, so it charges the same, and you decide which one you take home.

Least: wines built to erase the year. Non-vintage Champagne blends several harvests on purpose, which is why it has no year on it and why it tastes the same every Christmas. Tawny Port, aged Sherry and most Rioja Reservas are blended across plots and aged long enough that one wet September disappears. And the $10 bottle that says California: the law lets a vintage-dated wine from a whole state carry 15 percent from other years, and a wine from a named region 5 percent, but more to the point, a wine blended from grapes across a thousand miles has no year to speak of. The number on it is a date, not a vintage.

What to do with the bottle in front of you

Learn five numbers for each region you buy. Bordeaux: 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022 yes; 2013 and 2021 no, at any price. Napa: 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2023 yes; 2020 and 2022 only from an estate you trust, and taste before you buy a case. That is the whole chart you need, and it is worth more than any score.

Same price, different year: the year wins. The shelf does not price the vintage at the low end. Two bottles of the same château at the same price from 2021 and 2022 are a gift from the store, and the gift is the 2022.

A great year at a modest château beats a poor year at a famous one. I made this argument about second wines in No. 27 and it holds for the first wines: the name is printed on both; the weather was only in one.

In a bad red year, buy the whites. Burgundy 2024 is the current example. Cold, wet years that ruin Pinot Noir often make bright, nervy Chardonnay, and the price falls with the reputation of the year.

And if you are holding a bottle and cannot remember whether the year on it was the frost or the fire, photograph it and ask me. I carry every region’s chart, and I will tell you in a sentence whether that year was one to buy or one to leave for someone who did not ask.