Family winery hopeful after devastating fires
It will take a long time for California’s fire-ravaged wine country to recover from the loss of lives and property, but there is some good news to report.
The 2017 vintage is underway — something like 90% of the grapes were harvested before the fires began — and most tasting rooms are open for business and eager to welcome visitors.
One small winery that had a close call and is now looking to the future is Hamel Family Wines in Sonoma County. The family has longtime University of Wisconsin-Madison connections and their wines sport a badger on the label, albeit not exactly Bucky.
I recently talked with George Hamel III, who oversees sales and business operations, and his brother John Hamel II, who is in charge of winegrowing and winemaking.
George recounted being awakened by his dog the night of Oct. 8 when the fires began. He then got a call from friend Tony Moll, who alerted him to the approaching blaze. (George mentioned that Moll is a retired football player who was with the Packers for a couple of years beginning in 2006.)
“I threw on clothes and ran across the street” to wake up family members in a nearby house, he said, explaining that his parents, Pamela and George Jr., were staying with his brother because their home — which was subsequently destroyed in the fire — was being remodeled.
So began what he described as “the most surreal two weeks of my life. The fire was really close and moving at an alarming rate. It was hard to get realtime information. It’s a helpless feeling, really — the fires were raging fast and furious, and you think the fire is going one way and then it goes the opposite.”
They could see the fire as it “came over the hill and came all of the way to the top of the Upper Bench Vineyard and all along the north side of the property,” he said, noting that their nonvineyard property above the vineyard block caught fire, while most of the vines in their four vineyards were spared.
The vineyards actually “served as firebreaks,” he said.
He praised the firefighters, first responders and the community for their “tremendous help and support.”
And he was particularly grateful to the “whole staff — everyone was so helpful.”
But what about the wines? How is the 2017 vintage going to taste?
Smoke taint, which is what occurs when grapes take on undesirable smoky, medicinal or ashy characteristics, is a concern to all the winemakers in the area.
James T. Lapsley, a researcher at the University of California’s Agricultural Issues Center, where he studies economics regarding grape and wine production, wrote in an email that there’s a lot that is not known about smoke taint. But “one experiment shows that even 30 minutes of exposure can result in measurable compounds. Personally, I think that grapes that received several days of heavy smoke will have problems.”
But, again, because the fires happened later in the season, fewer grapes were exposed.
At the Hamel Family Winery, John says they were lucky because “we tend to pick earlier than some of our neighbors, so about 96% of the harvest was complete by the time the fire started.”
To keep the “smoky smell” out of the winery where the wines were fermenting, they sealed up the building as well as they could.
And John has now sent samples of the wines off to a laboratory that will test for the compounds that show up with smoke taint. “The lab is overwhelmed,” he noted.
Another problem is that power was off for several days during a “crucial period of fermentation,” which meant that temperatures were not being controlled and pumping over was not taking place.
As this winemaker explains it, “pumping over introduces air to keep the yeast happy.”
But so far, so good: “We had no stuck fermentation, and temperatures were not too hot. Everything seems to be in good shape.”
To better protect themselves from future fires, George said they will be extending service roads, creating permanent fire breaks, keeping down weeds and developing an emergency response plan, among other things.
Meanwhile, in Napa Valley, where the damage was less extensive, Michael Honig of Honig Vineyard & Winery wants to get the word out that “Napa Valley did not burn up — we’re still here.”
Honig, who chairs the board of Napa Valley Vintners, said he doesn’t want to minimize the problems but thinks that the dramatic “visuals” of the destruction during the fire might have given people the wrong impression, causing potential visitors to cancel trips to wineries.
He pointed out that “the vast majority of the Napa Valley from Silverado Trail to Highway 29 and from the southern tip of Carneros to Calistoga in the north suffered almost zero damage.”
The more general word from the California Wine Institute is that of the approximately 1,200 wineries in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties, 11 wineries were destroyed or heavily damaged, while a number of others sustained minor damage.
According to Honig, the smoke damage would have been worse if the fires had raged earlier in the season when thinner-skinned whites were hanging on the vines. But with these October fires, which occurred after much of the harvest, it was mostly late-ripening, thick-skinned — and more impervious — Cabernet that remained exposed.
Also, because winemakers routinely keep batches of fermenting wine separate, batches that are determined to be tainted can be eliminated, he said.
With 30-plus years of winemaking under his belt, Honig remains optimistic: “2017 will be an exciting vintage,” he said.
When it comes to possible wine shortages or price hikes from the affected areas, that picture is still being pieced together.
“I have told people that it seems that less than 1% of the processing capacity was affected and that no large wineries (more than 100,000 cases) were damaged,” wrote Lapsley from the Agricultural Issues Center.
Saying that he assumes there will be some shortages, he singled out Napa Cab as one possibility. “Given the demand for Napa Cabernet and relative inelasticity for those wines (i.e. not many substitutes), we would expect a price hike in some brands. But price is also a part of brand image, and brands with short supply may choose not to raise but to instead use their scarcity to focus on distribution.” This might mean, for example, that a winery would allocate scarce wines to specific restaurants.
So there’s a lot of wait and see for this vintage.
As John Hamel sums it up: “We’re in uncharted territory.”