UNDER THE SURFACE | How impending disaster yielded a change of style at Harlan

For most Napa Valley producers, 2020 is a vintage they would sooner forget – if they even made wine at all. For Harlan Estate, says Guy Woodward, the challenging conditions gave rise to a fresh approach that has since become the norm…

2020 is a vintage that will long be imprinted on the minds of Napa Valley winemakers – for all the wrong reasons. A season that began with the challenges of the COVID lockdown culminated with the catastrophic Glass Fire that saw whole crops, wineries – and homes – destroyed, leaving a legacy from which some are still recovering. 

For Harlan Estate, it turned out to be what winemaker Cory Empting looks back on as ‘one of the most pivotal moments in our journey’. Harlan is rare in Napa in dry-farming, something which allows for greater terroir expression, but also leaves it more exposed to the elements. And after a ‘very dry, very early’ growing season, an earlier, less severe fire on the other side of the valley had made Empting nervous. 

Empting has worked at Harlan since the turn of the century. The 2020 vintage, he says, was like ‘after 20 years of having a relationship with somebody, you realise you’ve missed something so key to what makes them singular and interesting.’ 

Two weeks later, Napa Valley was hit by the disastrous Glass Fire. ‘You could count on one hand the number of producers who had finished harvest,’ recalls Will Harlan. Most of those who hadn’t done so ended up not making a wine, such was the damage done if not by the flames, by smoke taint. 

For Harlan, two things came out of the experience. Firstly, as the estate’s founding director Don Weaver says, ‘Fire suppression became the number one job for everybody.’ With insurance companies quadrupling the price of their premiums – or not writing policies covering fire at all – that meant a huge investment in the infrastructure to protect the property. Harlan committed to a huge increase in water supply, and also doubled (to 20) the number of staff working full-time on its surrounding forests, trying to maintain the ecosystem while negating fire threats such as the dominant fir trees that are hugely flammable, and out-compete everything else.

The second legacy was something more tangible. ‘The 2020 wine marked a pretty dynamic change, stylistically,’ says Empting. ‘There’s a pretty remarkable difference in the alcohol level [13% versus a previous norm of 15%] and I think 2020 finishes with a cool, precise note.’ When Empting, Weaver and Harlan showed a series of vintages to the 67 Pall Mall team in London recently, Head Sommelier Federico Moccia picked out the 2020 for its ‘really pure, fresh, crunchy’ notes which, he said, are ‘difficult to find in any wine in the world’. ‘I really liked it,’ he told me later. 

So did the team at Harlan – so much so that in 2021, with a very similar growing season featuring the same rainfall, drought conditions and early bud break, they picked at the exact same time. In 2022, despite a later bud break and a touch more rainfall, they even brought the harvest forward by 10 days.

So is this ‘pure, gentle, elegant’ style of wine what the producer is now aiming for? ‘I would call it a culture rather than a style,’ says Will Harlan. ‘But yes, we were already moving in that direction.’ Empting points towards a trend since the property embraced dry farming, whereby the wine’s acidity is higher and the alcohol lower. ‘Over time, we’re accumulating this understanding of the estate, and we’re getting more confident about being able to be over there [at the more restrained end of the spectrum]. I think if you did a vertical tasting, you would see us marching towards that.’

‘We’ve spent the last 40 years – which is obviously a short period of time in the wine world – empirically trying to understand it,’ says Will Harlan. ‘But I think we’re on this more intuitive part of our journey now.’

Part of the reason for such confidence comes through the continuity of personnel. Weaver has been at Harlan since the start, while founding winemaker Bob Levy is still on hand to advise his successor, Empting, as and when needed.  

‘The whole wine world went through a riper phase through the end of the ‘90s and early 2000s, and the same thing happened in the Napa Valley,’ says Empting. ‘Fortunately [when it came to reining back on the approach], we had wines that we had made in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which were really important for us to look back on. And when you go back and taste those wines, like I did with Bob Levy, the way that they have evolved gave us a lot of confidence that this decision to pick earlier in 2020 felt very comfortable.’

Such evolution is all part of the famous 200-year plan that Will Harlan’s father Bill drew up when he founded the estate in 1984. ‘It’s all about this intentionality of wanting to create something that could be around for hundreds of years, over many, many generations,’ says Will. ‘That pairs quite well with wine because I’m not sure, if you’re aspiring to create wine at the very highest level, that you can accomplish that in one generation…’ 

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