Peppers are perennial but some play better at being perennial than others.
Some of my plants are in my garage as night time temperatures are hovering between 2 - 7C. I put them in the garage as winter sets in, the daytime sun is lower in the sky and the area that now gets direct sun is infront of my garage and this way I don't have to carry several totes of plants in the house; I just drag them into the garage. We have had a few 0C nights but on those occasions I do drag the totes into the house. Most likely next week, I will bring all my plants into the house permanently to overwinter as the forecast doesn't look pretty.
I have gotten 4 years out of a plant, mostly annuums, 2 for chinense varieties(we'll see what happens as I have an orange hab entering its 3rd year). My guess is you will have a 50/50 chance either it will live or it will die; I have had 2 almost identical plants sitting side by side, one just died and the other lived, who knows what happened. The plants will go into a sleep mode and drop some leaves, this is where the excitement happens trying to determine if the plant is dead or just in hibernation, some branches will brown and you have to determine if cutting those branches off is a good thing or bad, will cutting some branches cause a shock that cause the plant not to recover. My tepin is now a full 2 years old, this past winter it lost almost all its leaves, I thought of tossing it but then decided to leave it alone, it started to sprout new leaves in early May, then in late May I put it out on my deck and the shock caused it to drop most of its leaves, leaves grew back, this happened again during the early summer - the plant is now full of leaves but did not flower at all.
I will start by reviewing this forum to remind me of steps I should take to overwinter, kind of get a check list, take notes on final fertilization and watering frequency, whether to repot of trim roots, then set to it. I do have some plants that I don't want to overwinter, I had a friend give me what was thought to be a suryanki cluster but after testing the peppers I have a feeling it is a Dhanraj and its pods have very low heat value, Fresno grow like weeds so no sense in overwintering, I have a super chili that is entering its 2nd year and as I was sampling a pod decided to drop some seeds into soil - now I have several seedlings but the original plant looks tired and I don't think it will survive much longer.
Good luck.
