Wine · Terminology

Vintage

The year the grapes were harvested — and, on sparkling and fortified labels, a declaration of quality.

Vintage is the year the grapes were harvested — not the year the wine was bottled or released. On most labels it is a simple fact. On sparkling and fortified labels it is a claim: a vintage Champagne or a vintage Port is declared only in years the producer considers good enough.

Vintage matters in proportion to how variable the climate is. In marginal regions — Burgundy, Champagne, Bordeaux, Germany — the difference between two adjacent years can be enormous. In reliably warm ones, much less so.

In practice

  • 85% of the wine must come from the stated year in the EU, Australia and New Zealand; 95% in the USA for an AVA-labelled wine.
  • Non-vintage (NV) wines blend across years deliberately, for consistency — the basis of most Champagne and of Sherry's solera.
  • Northern and southern hemisphere vintages are six months out of step, so a "2024" from Chile reached the shelf long before a "2024" from France.
  • Vintage charts are broad-brush: a great producer in a poor year usually beats a weak one in a great year.

Where you'll meet it

  • Every still-wine label, and on vertical tastings, which exist to explore it.
  • Champagne, where vintage wines are perhaps 5% of production.
  • Vintage Port, declared roughly three times a decade.

What makes a vintage

Season What matters
Winter Cold enough for dormancy; rain to recharge soil water
Spring Frost risk at budburst
Early summer Weather at flowering — sets the crop size
Mid summer Heat and water: enough to ripen, not enough to shut the vine down
Late summer Véraison timing, disease pressure
Harvest Rain dilutes and rots; a dry window is everything

Vintage declarations

Champagne: a vintage is declared when the house judges the base wine good enough to stand alone; typically three or four years a decade, and minimum ageing is 36 months on the lees instead of 15.

Port: houses declare independently, usually two to four times a decade — 2016, 2017, and the very rare consecutive declarations, are the recent examples. Undeclared years go into Late Bottled Vintage, Tawny and Ruby.

Non-vintage is not a lesser category, incidentally. A house's NV blend is its signature and its largest, most carefully constructed wine.

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