The highs and lows of American vintage 2018

In preparing to summarise the state of the 2018 vintage in some of America’s top wine regions this week, I found myself relieved that the highlights did not include winemakers contending with raging wildfires, earthquakes or other natural disasters. Of course, this past year has not been completely free from fires in California and Oregon (and there was an ill-timed hurricane on the east coast) but these examples of force majeure thankfully weren’t raging around the ears of wine producers as they brought in their grapes at...