After a growing season of marked climatic contrasts, Chile’s largest wine producer, Concha y Toro, has declared the 2024 vintage as “excellent”, before providing a rundown on the quality of grapes in each region.
As previously reported by db, this year’s harvest has been unusually long in Chile, spanning as many as four months, due to opposing conditions in the far north of the country, compared to the central and southern zones of this long landmass. Indeed, as we noted last month, quoting Eduardo Jordan, who makes wines along the breadth of the country for Miguel Torres Chile, “This was one of the longest harvests I have known – we started harvesting on 2 February in Limarí, and were picking up until 9 May with Carmenère in Maule.” Such an extended period of picking was due to the very different weather across the country, with heat and drought characterising the northern vineyards of Limarí and Elqui, bringing forward harvesting by as much as three weeks, while cooler conditions further south, as well as an abundance of winter rains, delayed picking by almost the same amount. Overall, commentators for Concha y Toro called the 2024 harvest “excellent”, noting that “yields were in line with expectations, and grape quality “outstanding”. Nevertheless, the major producer added that the 2023-2024 growing period “was quite unique”, marked by a particularly rainy winter, which was one of the wettest of the past 30 years (with more than 600 millimetres in the central zone). Importantly, this high-level
This Article was originally published on The Drink Business - Wine
