Growers, vintners, and scientists are scrambling to protect California’s prized Napa Cab from the aftertaste of wildfires. benjwallace reports
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Oberholster poured samples of the three wines, and we both picked up the leftmost glass and stuck our noses in. I didn’t smell anything smoky. “They’re a bit cold, unfortunately,” she said. Cold means less volatile, which means less aromatic. These grapes were picked from a hillside where the Glass Fire had come right up to the vineyard but the smoke hadn’t lingered.
The 2020 fires were a turning point for Napa’s grape growers and winemakers. The first of them hit earlier in the season than the 2017 fires had, and many grapes were vulnerable because they hadn’t yet been harvested. And when the Glass Fire arrived in late September, it devastated the later-ripening varieties still on the vine — in particular, Cabernet Sauvignon, the grape with which Napa is almost synonymous and the basis for California’s preeminent luxury export.
It wasn’t just Napa that gained recognition. The label of the victorious bottle, above the name of the region and estate, also bore the words CABERNET SAUVIGNON. This was unusual: At the time, many people who drank Bordeaux or Champagne might have had no idea which grapes went into making it.
Deer Park was just leveled,” Alan Viader recalled. It was a morning in mid-February, and we were on the crest of the hill overlooking the main vineyard at Viader Winery, a 4,000-case direct-to-consumer producer founded by Viader’s mother, Delia, in Napa in the late 1980s. After the Glass Fire, Viader began preparing for the next time. We passed a pile of what looked like industrial-strength Super Soakers: They were “water axes,” gas-powered, high-pressure pumps with fire-hose nozzles that can shoot a blast of flame-dousing water a hundred feet. At the winery’s front gate, he had posted a reflective sign listing the main features of the property and other information for firefighters.
Photo: Bobby Doherty California wine is a $40 billion-plus industry, but only in the past few years has anybody paid much attention to the threat of smoke. Until 2017, much of Oberholster’s research at UC Davis skewed rather arcane . Then came the Tubbs Fire and, on its heels, three additional blazes that swept over Napa. Winemakers sued their insurance companies claiming millions of dollars of wine had been lost to smoke taint.
Oberholster is also trying to get better at predicting, after the smoke has cleared, which vineyards are likely to have been harmed and how badly. She and her colleagues are working with a private company to install a network of atmospheric sensors in vineyards all over California, Oregon, and Washington that will provide data on exactly how smoke breaks down as it moves. And she is looking for ways to treat wines that have already been finished.
After the 2017 fire in Napa raised questions about whether climate change was to blame, Petroski, who had been the winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards since 2012, winning accolades including the San Francisco Chronicle’s Winemaker of the Year, took it upon himself to go into the winery’s records and track the dates of the growing season for the previous ten years.
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