In Food+Home: As Wine Country rebuilds from the fires, vintners assess their plants.
As Wine Country rebuilds from the fires, vintners assess their plants
On top of Moon Mountain, at the Gilfillan Vineyard, Scott Knippelmeir kneels to the ground, pulls off the outer layers of a grape vine’s loose wood, and cuts into its trunk. He’s checking for signs of life. If the trunk is green, that’s good: The vine is still alive. If it’s dry and coffee-brown, that means the vine is dead.
Sounds simple enough, except that there are nearly 12,000 individual grape vines at this 6.5-acre vineyard, and each one appears to have suffered a different fate in October’s Nuns Fire. “The destruction just seems so … random,” says Knippelmeir, Gilfillan’s vineyard manager.
Indeed, on this late December afternoon, Gilfillan, which is owned by Lambert Bridge Winery, looks simultaneously normal and macabre. Green grass has sprouted between vineyard rows, and the plants have shed their leaves, now bare and ready for winter’s hibernation. But next to healthy-looking vines are pockets of charred chaparral, blackened manzanitas, collapsed sheds. Melted irrigation hoses droop misshapenly toward the ground, as if in a Salvador Dali painting.
Three months after the fires, Knippelmeir and Lambert Bridge winemaker Jennifer Higgins are still trying to assess the damage to Gilfillan — and today, they are also trying to form a plan to rehabilitate the burned vines.
It took a week after the Nuns Fire had passed through Moon Mountain before surrounding roads were re-opened; Higgins and Knippelmeir rushed up as soon as they were allowed. (All of the vineyard’s fruit was harvested before the fires.)
“We were expecting the worst,” Higgins says. As they approached, all they could see was burned vegetation.
“As soon as we saw that, we knew we were in trouble,” Knippelmeir says.
But it turned out that Gilfillan was largely spared: Only about four percent of the vines died, Higgins estimates.
“When we first got in here, we were going through the rows,” Higgins says. “We were looking at the vines — green, green, green, then brown — saying, ‘Is there a reason for this?’”
Adjacent vines here look completely different: In some cases, a vine’s rootstock is dead, but the canes at its top still have moist green tissue. Singed leaves don’t necessarily mean a singed plant. One wooden shed at Gilfillan burned; nearby, another stands intact. The most flammable spot in the entire vineyard — where a gas grill and propane tank stand underneath a huge pine tree — is, miraculously, unmarred.
What saved Gilfillan? The cover crop had been mowed, for one thing, so there wasn’t much brush between the vine rows to catch fire. There weren’t weeds growing around the base of each plant. The posts bookending the trellises are metal, not wood.
Ultimately, though, no one has a good answer for why one vine burned and another didn’t. The aftermath of the North Bay Fires has exposed how little we understand about the nexus of fire and vines.
“No one knows what’s the real threshold for heat damage,” says Rhonda Smith, the Sonoma County-based viticulture farm adviser for the University of California, who has come to Gilfillan to consult on its rehabilitation.
Much of the conventional wisdom about how fires interact with vines — that vines can’t burn, because of their high water content, for instance — didn’t turn out to be true for every vineyard, she says.
“In 99 percent of cases, vines were fire breaks,” says Smith. But if there was dry vegetation, if there was wood mulch on the ground, if the soil was especially dry — if, if, if — then they weren’t.
Now Higgins and Knippelmeir have some decisions to make. Which vines are not salvageable and have to be replanted entirely? That full replant is the worst-case scenario. It’s expensive, potentially costing hundreds of dollars per plant — more, if the underground risers that support the irrigation system need to be replaced — and it could be five more years before a vine is producing fruit.
Are there some cases in which the plant looks dead but the rootstock could be alive? If so, they could leave the rootstock in the ground and simply re-graft in the spring. “And we’d get fruit from that vine again in 2021,” Higgins says.
If only the canes are dead, Knippelmeir says, the problem could be fixed with simple pruning — by cutting off the canes and leaving only spurs. That way, you’d lose one year of fruit production.
“Or the big question: do you treat the vine normally and just hope for the best?” Higgins says. “Wondering how it’s going to wake up — that’s the hardest part.”
Fortunately, Lambert Bridge has insurance on Gilfillan — not only crop insurance, which is commonplace and reimburses a grower for the value of its fruit, but also insurance on the vineyard infrastructure itself. That should help with replanting costs.
The damage could have been much worse. Even so, “this is farming,” Higgins says. “You plan for good years and bad years.”
And while some might find the randomness of the fire’s destruction frustrating, Rhonda Smith finds it astounding. “This is an amazing plant,” she says, pointing at a charred vine. “It could be injured on one side and fine on the other side, and still do exactly what you need it to do.”