One year counts
The vintage on the label
If the label says 2021, does that mean every single grape really came from the 2021 harvest? Almost, but not quite: the EU allows a small tolerance. Once you understand how this rule works, you'll read the vintage with completely different eyes.
The eighty-five percent rule
A vintage may appear on the label if at least 85 percent of the grapes were actually harvested in that year. The remaining 15 percent may come from a different year, usually the previous one, when a cellar master wants to round out a blend's flavour. That sounds like a loophole, but it's actually practical. Without this tolerance, a winery would have to keep every single tank strictly separate, even though everything ends up in the same bottle anyway. For the drinker, this changes almost nothing, since the taste is nearly always shaped by the main vintage.
The rule is set out in Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/33 and applies equally across the whole Union, from Portugal to Romania. It's important to distinguish this from the grape variety rule. If a single grape variety is also named, a separate, stricter threshold applies to it. Both rules can even be combined. A wine can carry both a vintage and a grape variety on the label, each with its own minimum requirement.
Why a single year makes such a difference
Vines are sensitive to weather, far more sensitive than, say, grain. A cool, rainy summer produces less ripe grapes with more acidity, while a hot, dry summer produces sweeter grapes with less of it. Between two vintages from the same site and the same winemaker, worlds can lie apart even though nothing else has changed. This very fluctuation is what makes the vintage one of the most honest pieces of information on the entire label.
This is why wine experts keep so-called vintage charts, small overviews that assign a quality rating to a region and a year. Such charts serve as rough orientation but never replace tasting, since an individual winemaker can rescue good grapes even in a difficult year through early intervention. Climate change is shifting these patterns further still. Regions that once struggled almost every year now deliver ripe grapes more consistently than they did thirty years ago.
When there's no vintage at all
Some labels deliberately skip a year. This is often marked with the abbreviation NV, for "Non Vintage". That's not a flaw, but in certain styles it's actually the norm. Champagne without a vintage deliberately blends several harvest years. That way, the bottle tastes the same every year, no matter how moody the last summer was. The goal is a reliable house style rather than a portrait of one year, so that a particular bottle tastes recognisable year after year, regardless of how the weather played out in the vineyard.
Sherry goes a step further still, with the so-called solera system, in which barrels of different ages are gradually topped up into one another. A single drop can, in theory, contain fractions from decades. A vintage would technically be impossible to pin down here. So if you see a bottle without a year on it, don't read that as a warning sign, but as a clue to a completely different style of winemaking.
How much the vintage really reveals
A great vintage doesn't turn a mediocre site into a top wine. Conversely, a weak vintage doesn't automatically turn a top site into a discard. The year is one clue among several, not a quality seal on its own. Anyone buying a bottle does well to read the vintage together with the origin and the producer. The vintage alone shouldn't be trusted on its own.
For wines meant for ageing, though, the vintage counts double. It reveals how long a bottle has already been on its journey and how much time it has left. A young Riesling from the Mosel can often withstand decades in the cellar. A simple everyday wine, by contrast, should be drunk within a few years. The vintage thus also serves as a small guide to the right ageing time. It's more than just a reminder of the harvest year. Anyone who knows the year knows roughly how much patience a bottle still deserves.