A hot year, but with cooler climate wines: Argentina’s 2024 vintage

Warm in temperature, yet cool in character is how many of Argentina’s winemakers are summarising the 2024 harvest — which, yet again, presented unusual characteristics in the face of climate change. Amanda Barnes reports.

“It’s been a hot year, but a truly great vintage — with wines showing the freshness of a cool year,” sums up Edy del Popolo, who produces Susana Balbo Wines and PerSe, of vintage 2024.

The winter and spring had two important differentiating factors — for better and worse. Firstly, the unusually high level of winter rain and snowfall offered producers a much needed windfall to top up the depleted water reserves that were at a 30-year low. But the winter and spring was also ravaged by an unusually high occurrence of Zonda winds.

The Zonda — high-altitude foehn winds which can run at over 100 km/hr — bring hot, sandy winds which can damage delicate spring buds.

“Throughout the entire month of November there was a true marathon of Zonda winds!,” continues del Popolo. “It is rare to see Zondas of such long duration and intensity, and they caused damage to many shoots and buds.”

Although the Zonda lowered yields in many regions, overall production is still up from the historic low yield of last year’s vintage, which was ravaged by late frosts. Early estimates for the 2024 harvest are around 10-15% lower than the average in the main Cuyo region. The worst impacted by the Zonda was northern Argentina in the Calchaquí Valleys, where some winemakers are reporting losses of up to 30%.

While the southernmost regions of Argentina, in Patagonia, had their own challenges with an extremely cold winter and spring — and producers having to combat multiple frost episodes, causing some losses in production.

Promising quality from a slow maturation, despite the heat

A series of heat waves in Argentina’s main wine regions during the summer also presented challenges: “The vines shut down and stopped photosynthesis, which meant we had great heterogeneity in the vineyards,” says Juan Pablo Murgia of Bodega Argento, “in our Agrelo vineyard, for example, we had up to 3° difference of potential alcohol between Malbec plots!”

While that meant more work in splitting harvests, the overall quality for Vintage 2024 was very high: “The heat didn’t negatively impact the quality, in fact to the contrary!” adds Murgia. “Our wines this year are showing great depth and colour, but with great freshness. And the maturation window was long and slow, which in my experience is always when we produce the best wines.”

White wines too are looking promising: “Our Chardonnay [in the Uco Valley] was harvested one to two weeks later than average,” says Alejandro Vigil, winemaker of Catena Zapata.

“This year they are characterised by herbal or rather floral and white fruit aromas, with high acidity levels.”

Amanda Barnes is the drinks business´ regular South America correspondent and author of The South America Wine Guide.