The Chile Vintage 2020 will be a harvest no-one will ever forget, not only due to an extremely early and hot season that was made especially challenging because of the ongoing drought, but also because it was impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic that broke out towards the end of harvest.
“This vintage is definitely one we will all remember,” says Emily Faulconer of Viña Carmen, who makes wine with grapes from all over Chile. “To start, it was marked by the very serious drought and a warmer winter than usual, which meant much earlier flowering in most vineyards. A hot year like this can be very challenging in terms of organisation, as the window for harvest is much smaller and more complex and you are harvesting red and white varieties at the same time. But in this case, it was a blessing in disguise – although we didn’t know at the time that we were about to face the Coronavirus pandemic – because it meant that most of our harvest was done by the time quarantine started.”
Harvest dates were brought forward by between a week and month in some valleys, meaning that most producers had brought in the vast majority of their grapes by late March when curfew and quarantine restrictions came in.
The earlier harvest was also aided by the decreased yields; there was a widespread reduction of between 20% and 30% caused by a combination of drought conditions, hot temperatures and significant losses from a bout of ferocious frost events in September, October and November — with several nights dropping below 0˚C each month in many regions of the Central Valley.
