Paso Robles 2022 vintage: Best wines from a challenging year

After a near-perfect 2021 vintage in Paso Robles, on the Central Coast, the 2022 harvest came in hot. It was a vintage defined by a relentless 10-day heat spike of 40°C or hotter from 31 August through 9 September, forcing vintners into a sprint to pick early, resulting in a compacted harvest window.

‘The growing season was flawless,’ recalls Elena Martinez, co-owner and founder of Top Winery. But it was game over once the ill-timed heat spike came.

Growers reckoned with raisining and sunburned bunches, resulting in huge amounts of fruit having to be dropped and left in the vineyard, with further extensive sorting and rejection of fruit in the winery required. Yields suffered immensely.

Scroll to see notes and scores for Brianne Cohen’s 30 picks from Paso Robles’ 2022 vintage

With this considerable late-season vineyard pressure, according to Jeff Strekas, director of wine-growing for Onx Wines and winemaker for LXV Wine: ‘This became a vintage that rewarded the producers who were in the vineyards as much as possible.’

How you navigated picking decisions, including getting grapes off the vines that were ripening at an incredible rate ‘made a difference’, says Jason Haas, proprietor at Tablas Creek Vineyard. He adds: ‘The range of outcomes was much greater than normal.’

Paso Robles: Know your vintages

2021: After a challenging 2020 vintage, 2021 arrived in this key region in California’s Central Coast with near-perfect conditions, though with lower-than-ideal yields. Where successful, the best examples showed power and balance, with acidity as a welcome foil. 4.5/5

2020: A difficult vintage from all sides, including drought, dramatic heat spikes and smoke from nearby wildfires, coupled with pandemic-related stressors, including face masks. Widely mixed quality, depending on the producer. Not all producers made wine due to smoke taint or potential smoke taint issues from the wildfires. 3/5

2019: An excellent vintage on all accounts. The 2019 growing season and the harvest were ‘perfect’, with many reports of it being ‘one of the best’ and ‘favourite’ vintages in recent history. The wines are dense, structured, powerful and will be very long-lived. 5/5

2018: A desirable, long growing season crafting wines of classic structure and intense fruit. Wines with firm tannins and ageing potential. A strong, powerhouse vintage. 4.5/5

Triumph over adversity

Despite these challenges, many have been pleasantly surprised with the quality of the wines from the 2022 vintage. ‘The wines are tasty and the tannins are soft,’ says Justin Smith, owner and winemaker at Saxum Vineyards, ‘similar to 2017, the most recent hot vintage.’

The wines can broadly be described as approachable and open-knit. Martinez shares that they are ‘consumer-friendly, with softer tannins’. They are enjoyable already but with a moderate capacity for ageing, with some producers recommending drinking the 2022 Paso wines before the 2021s.

‘2022 was the most challenging vintage of my career from a farming standpoint,’ says Hilary Graves, vineyard and grower relations manager at Booker Vineyard. ‘I questioned myself as I was making decisions I never had to make before.’

Owing to the hot conditions across the region, the top 2022 wines in Paso Robles tend to come from two of its westernmost appellations: the Adelaida and Willow Creek districts, collectively referred to as West Paso.

The intensity of heat in the greater Paso Robles region can make for very ripe wines, rich in fruit intensity and alcohol. However, the maritime influence of Paso’s western reaches modulates the intense heat with ocean-borne fog, consistent wind and moderately cooler overall temperatures.

These factors were vital for producing wines of balance and quality in the 2022 vintage.

See all 73 Brianne Cohen’s Paso Robles recommendations from the 2022 vintage

Paso’s 2022 sweet spot

Adelaida

Lying closest to the Pacific Ocean, Adelaida District is situated less than 10km from the coast, just over the Santa Lucia Range. Adelaida typically experiences the highest average rainfall in the Paso region.

At Tablas Creek’s Adelaida estate vineyard, December was the wettest month on record, receiving 350mm of rain out of the annual total of 500mm. The year 2022 marked the third consecutive year of drought.

Adelaida District boasts the highest vineyard elevation in Paso, up to 670m. Soils are limestone-dominant with water-retaining properties helping to retain freshness and acidity in the wines.

‘Considering how challenging the growing season was, we’re delighted with how the wines turned out,’ says Oliver Mikkelsen, winemaker and vineyard manager at Maha and Villa Creek. ‘The 2022s are fresh, less complex in tannin structure, and will drink well upon release.’

Willow Creek

Nestled directly south of Adelaida, Willow Creek District shares many characteristics with its neighbour to the north. Its increased exposure to the Pacific results in cooler temperatures and a more pronounced benefit from the Templeton Gap effect.

This cooling effect allows for wide diurnal ranges, with warmer days and much cooler evenings, allowing the grapes to rest and refresh. ‘Cool’ is a relative term in Paso; hot weather is typical, with cooler nights in general than in the other sub-districts.

The 2022 wines from Willow Creek tend to show higher acidity, a vital piece of the quality puzzle in Paso to balance fruit concentration, tannins and alcohol levels that come from high temperatures.

This was particularly true in the 2022 vintage, with the late heat spike creating challenges for balance in the wines. Notable Willow Creek vineyards include James Berry, G2, L’Aventure and Paper Street.

Established in 1983, Paso Robles (‘pass of the oaks’ in Spanish) is a region with 16,500ha planted, making it a sizeable player in California.

The region, which has 11 sub-districts (see map), experiences the most significant diurnal temperature swing of any California wine region, with temperatures ranging from 2°C to 10°C in a single day, and this allows the grapes to retain acidity. The growing season is extended due to these daily swings.

That factor, coupled with regular late-season rains, allows grapes to benefit from more time on the vine, resulting in wines that can show mature, ripe fruit characters coupled with firm acidity.

The region also benefits from the Templeton Gap effect, whereby openings in the coastal Santa Lucia mountain range act like a funnel to allow cooler coastal air to rush into the valley, allowing the grapes to rest and refresh.

Critical decisions

The 2022 season was average in length as bud break was slightly early, and the harvest was compressed due to the heatwave. ‘We were on top of everything, before it changed,’ notes Jordan Lonborg, vineyard manager and grower relations at Tablas Creek.

‘Relentless and compact’ is how Graves describes the 2022 heat spike that wreaked havoc in the vineyard late in the season.

In excessive heat, the sugar levels in grapes on the vine (measured in degrees Brix) climb fast, but phenolic ripeness in the seeds, skins and stems generally lags behind.

In 2022, Tablas Creek saw Brix levels climb four to five degrees over three to four days, compared to its normal one to two degrees in a week.

‘It was panic mode,’ says Haas. High temperatures force vines to shut down, meaning that vineyard teams were compelled to make tough decisions about when to pick.

To mitigate the heat, Tablas Creek used irrigation (which rarely happens after veraison, the point at which grapes begin to change colour) on its most heat-sensitive varieties to provide them with the water reserves they need just to survive.

Cris Cherry, co-founder and director of winemaking at Maha Estate, which also produces the Villa Creek range, used more whole clusters than he usually would during fermentation to beef up some of the savoury or non-fruit characteristics and build tannin structure in the wines.

Ripple effect

At Saxum, Smith reveals that they hand-trimmed raisined sections of clusters in the vineyard, specifically for Grenache. In the end, one third of the Saxum crop was dropped to the ground due to poor fruit quality.

Saxum’s main sites, the estate James Berry vineyard and G2 vineyard, are cooler, and the struggle was that they couldn’t pick early to get ahead of the heat spike, as the fruit there wasn’t yet ripe.

The ripple effect of the heat spike was also felt in the winery. Says Graves: ‘We were making decisions to bring fruit in earlier than we normally would, because it was getting so beat-up with desiccation and dehydration.’

Haas, describing it as ‘triage’ in the cellar, says: ‘It was the busiest week we’ve ever had in our cellar history.’

Based on the city’s northern edge, Top Winery dealt with an array of difficulties, including stuck fermentations and malolactic conversion finishing before primary fermentation, which then meant the musts had to be innoculated with yeasts in order to restart the alcoholic fermentation.

In the end, says Martinez: ‘We were very selective about what we bottled.’ Consequently, some lots and barrels didn’t make the cut, and owners Martinez and Stanley Barrios were compelled to sell some wine on the bulk market.

Paso Robles 2022: Cohen’s picks

Vintage rating: 4/5

Wines of the vintage

White Saxum, James Berry Vineyard 93pts

Red Saxum, James Berry Vineyard 95pts

Value picks Giornata, Fiano (£26.29 All About Wine; US$30-$35 K&L, Solano Cellars, The Wine Connection, The Wine Stop) Tablas Creek, Patelin de Tablas Blanc (£23 The Wine Society; US$28 tablascreek.com) Turley, Pesenti Vineyard Zinfandel (US$45-$53 Widely available nationally)

Built-in resilience

From a vintage as challenging as 2022 turned out to be, broader lessons of resilience emerge. Maha Estate has vineyards positioned right on the border between the Adelaida and Willow Creek sub-districts – the two top-performing zones in 2022 (see ‘sweet spot’ box above).

Farming has been conducted organically here since planting began in 2012, accompanied over the last seven years by no-till agriculture; a portion of the vineyard has been dry-farmed for 10 years, and the rest is minimally irrigated.

‘We’ve trained the grapevines to dig deep into the subsoil for moisture,’ explains Cherry. ‘If you can force vines down deep, the personality of the fruit will be that much more unique, and the uptake of micro-nutrients and minerals will show a more transparent profile of the place the fruit comes from.’

Through this approach, vines also develop deeper root systems and can access stored water, meaning they’re less affected by what’s happening above ground.

Similarly, back at Booker, Graves says: ‘The more we have focused on soil health, the more resilient our vines have become.’ Booker’s 35ha Willow Creek District estate vineyard is certified organic and Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC). ‘Our vines hung in a bit longer [in 2022], whereas I saw other vines that collapsed.’

Access to a secure labour force was also crucial for this challenging harvest season. Faced with the sudden need to pick immediately, competition was intense for the finite number of field crew in the region.

You struggled less if you had good existing relationships with the farm labour contractor groups, who liaise with vineyard workers, since securing vineyard workers became so difficult.

Tablas Creek had the advantage of being insulated from these issues because it has a year-round crew. Equally, because it meets ROC standards requiring farm workers to be paid a living wage and provided with good working conditions, Tablas Creek is also a sought-after employer by the region’s skilled vineyard workers.

Given the very challenging late conditions in the vineyards, the resultant 2022 Paso Robles wines show surprising beauty and resilience – the vintage was certainly a nail-biter, but it had a happy ending.

‘2022 changed the paradigm for how we operate in the vineyard,’ concludes Onx Wines’ Strekas.

Cohen’s pick: 30 Paso Robles 2022 standouts

Related articles

• Willow Creek: Paso Robles’ coolest sub-region
• Paso Robles looks to Bordeaux for sustainable insights
• Paso Robles 2021: Vintage report and top 30 wines