After a growing season of marked climatic contrasts, Chile’s 2024 harvest has been declared as excellent.
This year’s harvest has been unusually long in Chile, spanning as many as four months, due to opposing conditions in the far north of the country, compared to the central and southern zones of this long landmass.
Such an extended period of picking was due to the very different weather across the country, with heat and drought characterising the northern vineyards bringing forward harvesting by as much as three weeks, while cooler conditions further south, as well as an abundance of winter rains, delayed picking by almost the same amount.
Overall, commentators called the 2024 harvest “excellent”, noting that “yields were in line with expectations, and grape quality “outstanding”.
The 2023-2024 growing period “was quite unique”, marked by a particularly rainy winter, which was one of the wettest of the past 30 years (with more than 600 millimetres in the central zone). Importantly, this high-level of winter-time precipitation allowed the soils to be cleansed of salts, while replenishing water levels.
El Niño and La Niña
Chile is a country climatically influenced by the presence or absence of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena. After being influenced by La Niña between 2018 and 2023 – which led to slightly cooler-than-usual sea surface temperatures, less rainfall, and lower temperatures and thermal accumulation in Chile’s interior – El Niño began to reverse the trend at the beginning of 2023. This translates to a slight increase in sea surface temperatures, more cloud cover and water condensation, higher rainfall, and warmer temperatures inland.