Smoke taint hits wineries, not drinkers

The 2020 fire season feels scary for everyone who lives on the West Coast. But there’s a unique type of anxiety for those whose livelihoods depend on crops that are ripening under these smokechoked skies.

When wildfire smoke lingers in the air, compounds from the smoke can make their way into grapes hanging on the vine and imbue the resulting wine with a set of flavors and aromas that are unpleasantly smoky. The phenomenon, known as smoke taint, can ruin a wine.

By now, it’s clear that smoke taint will be the question of the California wine industry’s 2020 harvest. It’s a question that we can’t yet answer. Yes, it seems inevitable at this point that some of this year’s wine grapes will be irreparably impacted by wildfire smoke. But how widespread that damage is, and the degree of harm to individual vineyards, are still unknown quantities.

In the meantime, though, I think it’s important to get one message across: Smoke taint is a concern for winemakers and farmers. It should not, however, be a concern for wine drinkers.

Farmers are at risk of losing their paycheck for the entire year. If their fruit is damaged by smoke, the wineries who buy the fruit might reject it. Some farmers have crop insurance that would compensate for these losses; many don’t.

Winemakers, on the other hand, have to contend with the possibility of investing in wine that could turn out undrinkable. They might buy the fruit and go to the trouble of fermenting it and put it into expensive oak barrels, only to find the finished wine unpleasantly smoky. That’s a big financial hit. Smoke compounds are notoriously sneaky; they can hide in grape juice or wine in a nonvolatile state, only to reveal themselves later, so a winemaker might not even know what they’re dealing with initially.

These are awful prospects with dangerous consequences for a $40 billion statewide industry.

But for you, a drinker of California wine, there are no risks.

First of all, consuming smoketainted wine is not known to be harmful to health in any way. Drinking a smoky Pinot Noir is not like standing outdoors in smoky air.

More to the point, you are highly unlikely to ever taste a smoketainted wine, because wineries are bending over backwards right now to ensure that no compromised liquid enters a bottle. They are spending thousands of dollars on lab testing, considering cutting back on their production and investigating ways to mitigate any smoke exposure that does manifest itself in a wine. Many wineries would sooner dump out millions of dollars’ worth of product than put a damaged one on the shelf.

Finally, even if the smoke damage to California’s 2020 grape harvest is widespread — and we don’t know whether it will be — the chances are quite slim that your particular favorite wine will be ruined. Consider the case of Australia. Its catastrophic 20192020 fire season played out during its wine grape harvest, too. The blazes burned more than 46 million acres of land; compare that to 3 million in California so far this year. Given the scope of those fires, one might expect a lot of Australia’s wines to be damaged. But according to Wine Australia CEO Andreas Clark, about 3% of the wine grape tonnage is estimated to have been lost to smoke.

This is an ongoing story. Winemakers and grape growers have reason to be scared, and they also have reason for hope. But one way or another, no matter what it takes, when you’re drinking a 2020 California Cabernet Sauvignon a couple of years from now, I’m willing to bet it will taste just fine.