In addition to the 20 wineries damaged or destroyed by the Glass Fire, countless others are dealing with possible smoke damage to their grapes after a relentless fire season that started with the LNU Complex Fire.
David Tate is the winemaker and general manager at Barnett Vineyards where half of the vines were damaged and the winery has decided to compost the rest.
“It’s really emotionally sad for me because it’s just like losing a year of your child’s life. It’s gonna be gone,” he said.
There is no clear way to tell the extent of the damage at this point, but Tate says the risk is too high.
“We went through this in 2008 with Anderson Valley. We brought in the pinot and fermented it, seemed fine. And then four months later on, pulls a sample out of the barrel and tasted it – tasted like wet ashtray.”
That is why chemists like Leigh Myering are in high demand. Her lab in Napa can measure the proteins in your wine to predict if it will turn cloudy when left in the car too long, or develop shards that look like broken glass if left in the freezer. But no one knows yet how to measure the level of smoke taint.
“We’re measuring compounds and saying, ‘well these compounds are there so there might be a chance that the wine would be impacted.’ But sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t,” she explained. “So I think until we really can definitively say that these particular chemical compounds are predictors of poor wine quality, I just don’t want to invest in it.”
Just a few years ago when the North Bay was devastated by the 2017 fires, no one in the industry thought that smoke taint was going to become a recurring issue, and certainly not as quickly as it has.
“Fire can have an impact even if it’s not close to you, if the smoke moves up and then settles right over your vineyard. But how much does it affect it? Maybe not as much as if it’s local? We don’t know yet, just don’t have enough data,” said Myering.
But given how this year is gone, she says maybe skipping the vintage is not such a terrible thing. “I don’t know, I mean I don’t think 2020 was a great year for anybody honestly, so maybe we don’t drink to 2020 this year.”