Vintner fears smoke could ruin his crop
This week, winemaker Noah Dorrance was in the process of making an excruciating decision.
“I think there’s a better chance than not that we make almost no wine this year,” said the owner and winemaker of Reeve Wines in Healdsburg, a highend producer known for Pinot Noir and Riesling.
The reason: Wildfire smoke from the LNU Lightning Complex fires may have damaged his grapes from vineyards in various parts of Sonoma County, Dorrance said, tainting them with unpleasantly smoky aromas and flavors. He feared the same might be true of the fruit he buys from Mendocino County, too.
Conventional wisdom says that it takes 10 days of prolonged, heavy smoke exposure to seriously damage wine grapes, an effect called smoke taint. But Dorrance said his personal experience suggests otherwise. He’s made wines from wildfireadjacent vineyards before that seemed OK at first, but six months later were overcome by smokiness. This time around, he says, he can already taste the effects of smoke on some grapes hanging near the Walbridge Fire, which has burned more than 52,000 acres in northern Sonoma County.
“We did a lot of grape sampling,” he said, “and just with the juice, you could already taste and smell this ashy, barbecued flavor, kind of like a campfire.”
For a winemaker like Dorrance, taking a chance on potentially smoketainted wines simply isn’t worth it. He doesn’t own his vineyards, so he has to pay farmers for the fruit he buys. He doesn’t own his own winemaking facility, so he has to rent space at a customcrush winery, which for red wines charges him $2,500 per ton. In a typical vintage, Reeve would process about 125 tons of wine grapes. He’s processed about 6 tons so far this year, all grapes for sparkling wine that were harvested before the fires.
Winemakers who own their own land and winemaking facilities would have a different economic calculation, but Dorrance has less financial wiggle room, he said. “As a small winery, to end up six to nine months down the road with something we can’t use — that would put us out of business,” said Dorrance, who runs the Reeve label with his wife, Kelly.
It wouldn’t be the first time that Dorrance has chosen not to make a wine because of wildfire smoke. In 2017, he rejected Sangiovese grapes from a vineyard in the Chalk Hill area of Sonoma County; in 2018, he declined to pick grapes from a vineyard in Mendocino County’s Potter Valley. (Farmers can usually collect crop insurance if a winemaker rejects the fruit before it’s picked.)
In the past, though, the problem was confined to specific vineyards, or his team had harvested grapes before fires. This year’s early fire presents an unprecedented situation. “I had never considered that smoke could affect everything we make,” he said, though he noted that vineyards in other parts of Northern California might be safe.
Dorrance may prove to be an outlier. Many winemakers are harvesting fruit amid the fires and reporting positive prognoses. Schatzi Throckmorton, coowner of Relic Wines, said her team had harvested Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from vineyards in Sebastopol, Occidental and Napa’s Carneros region over the weekend. Those areas are not as close to the fires as some of the vineyards that
Dorrance works with.
“The Chardonnay and Pinot that’s come in so far is delicious and beautiful, and exactly how we would have picked it in any other vintage,” Throckmorton said. The only hiccup was that they had to delay the harvesting by a few days because of road closures near the Relic winery, on Napa’s Atlas Peak.
There is little scientific consensus about the details of how smoke taint works, and it’s often difficult to gauge whether it’s even present or not. Many laboratories test for only a few of the compounds that can contribute to it. Sometimes, a wine may taste fine initially, but smoketaint compounds can become volatile as a result of fermentation or aging, revealing themselves later.
A new, possibly more accurate test is available this year, Dorrance said, but it requires winemakers to make a microfermentation — a very small batch of wine — before the lab can test it. That could take weeks, making it largely ineffective for winemakers trying to make quick decisions. (“It’s as slow as COVID testing,” Dorrance joked.)
Can Reeve make it as a business if it has to effectively skip the 2020 vintage? Maybe. Dorrance was still considering trying to buy fruit from other parts of California unaffected by wildfire, or even Oregon. Reeve’s wine sales depended heavily on restaurants preCOVID19, and during the pandemic it’s become more challenging to sell wine, said Dorrance, so reducing inventory could actually help balance things out.
“It’s potentially a little bit of a blessing,” he said. “Fingers crossed, as long as 2021 turns out OK, we can probably find a way to bridge the gap.”
But Dorrance was sure about one thing: He needs to decide soon, before the grapes hanging on the vine potentially accumulate even more smoke. “It’s been less than a week,” he said. “It’s only going to get worse.”