Smoketaint quandary has wineries in chaos
Testing that detects damage to grapes backlogged for weeks
If wines reflect the unique attributes of the year in which they were made, then California’s 2020 vintage may carry the distinctive notes of uncertainty, confusion and chaos.
The immediate — though certainly not the only — issue for the state’s wine industry is wildfire smoke, which has the ability to imbue wine grapes with irrepressible, unpleasant smoky aromas and flavors. Because of the unusually early timing and large geographic spread of this year’s wildfires, more California wine grapes are at risk of smoke damage than ever before.
Risk is the key word; it seems certain that many vineyards’ fruit will be safe. In 2017, the Wine Country fires blanketed a confined geographic area in heavy smoke, leaving little doubt that the few grapes still hanging on the vine were compromised. But this year, the smoke is both more widespread and more diffuse — a little bit everywhere, rather than a lot in one place.
The problem is that almost no one can know for certain which camp their grapes fall into. Northern California’s leading analyst, ETS Laboratories, has had an unprecedented volume of submissions this year, meaning delays of over a month despite the fact that it more than doubled its testing capacity — by the time a winemaker learns whether their grapes are clear, the crop may be long overripe.
That’s creating hectic ripple effects. Winemakers are considering shipping their wine samples as far afield as Australia, and some are trying to break their grape contracts with farmers, who were already facing the harsh consequences of a statewide surplus . One Healdsburg grower, John Teldeschi, has had nearly 90% of his grapes rejected by wineries, and is selling fruit that normally commands $4,000 a ton for $500.
Early results show that “a significant portion of the samples that are coming through are not showing the markers of smoke impact,” said Gordon Burns, cofounder of ETS Laboratories. But with the backlog, farmers and winemakers are forced to make decisions in the dark about whether to go ahead and harvest the grapes, taking a chance on major financial losses.
“It’s like Schrödinger’s cat,” said Morgan TwainPeterson, owner of Bedrock Wine Co. in Sonoma. “We don’t know if the cat is dead or alive, but the only way to figure it out is ferment.”
The smoke crisis adds to the list of struggles that California’s wine industry was already confronting this year. Even before the COVID19 pandemic shut down tasting rooms and restaurants, California had been tracking an oversupply of wine grapes, the confluence of a string of highyielding harvests with slowing U.S. wine sales.
Burns admits “it’s inarguable that the delays in receiving results are not desirable.” But he insists his lab could not have prepared sufficiently for 2020. In the past two years, they’ve doubled their testing capacity and added more than a million dollars’ worth of new instruments, he said. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the industry that would have predicted the extent of what happened this year.”
The standard method for assessing smoke impact is to test for the presence of several compounds — especially the two primary culprits, guaiacol and 4methylguaiacol — that are known to contribute the smoky flavors and aromas. This test can be performed on grapes fresh off the vine, but those results may not tell the full story, since some compounds may become perceptible only during fermentation.
“These compounds can, in the berry, hide themselves by attaching themselves to sugars,” said Burns. “When they do that, they have little or no aroma, but then during fermentation they can detach from those sugars and come back out as the characters that people smell and taste.”
Therefore, ETS recommends that wineries also perform a microferment, making a tiny batch of wine, and submit that for analysis, too. But that microferment can take a winemaker a week or more to complete. Add that onto the monthplus lag time for results, and it becomes impossible for anyone to make informed, realtime decisions.
Nick Briggs, winemaker at Sonoma County’s Dutcher Crossing Winery, said that, so far, his fermentations are tasting clean. With the long turnaround for test results, though, he couldn’t be sure, and he’s worried.
“The general feeling is still unease,” he said.
Unwilling to wait for ETS results, TwainPeterson looked into submitting microferment samples to labs in Australia, and ended up sending them to British Columbia. In the meantime, he’s going ahead and making wine, just hoping for the best. That’s largely because he doesn’t want to stiff the farmers whose fruit he purchases, some of whom don’t have crop insurance.
“We took in some fruit that I’m pretty sure is going to be smoketainted,” he said. “But we’ll give it a chance. It’s just doing a solid for the growers and giving them every last opportunity for something to go right.”
If TwainPeterson makes a wine that turns out to be smoketainted, the grower or the grower’s insurance might pay him back for the price of the grapes. He’d still be out the cost of production, but he could sell the unusable wine on the bulk market, where it would likely be distilled into brandy. He estimates he could make about 60 cents a gallon on that, “which is laughable, because our inhouse processing costs are $10 to $12 a gallon,” he said.
The situation puts farmers in an especially tough position. Teldeschi, the farmer who had most of his grapes rejected by wineries citing smoke taint, doesn’t have crop insurance, which means he won’t be reimbursed for the money the wineries had promised to pay him. A neighbor purchased the grapes at a rate far lower than he usually gets, but it’s hopefully enough for him to keep the vineyard, he said.
Teldeschi, whose family has owned the vineyard for 50 years, suspects there may be another motive at play: that some wineries, finding themselves with excess inventory due to the oversupply, want to cut back on production and are using smoke as a cover.
“Any excuse to say ‘take your fruit and do something else with it’ was their way out,” he said.
That sort of maneuver is happening throughout California right now, said Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, a cooperative of 450 growers who collectively farm 40,000 acres. With no industrywide thresholds that standardize how much smoke taint is too much, some wineries are rejecting farmers’ fruit without providing a sound analysis.
“It’s an attempt to repudiate a contract,” Bitter said. Crop insurance, he added, is “not very widely held,” since it can be expensive, and in past years, farmers did not often need it.
Grape growers could receive federal aid if Congress authorizes the Wildfire Hurricane Indemnity Program Plus fund for 2020, which Rep. Mike Thompson, DNapa, considered “a top priority,” according to a spokesperson.
The lack of a standardized threshold speaks to the general paucity of knowledge about smoke taint. Although fire and smoke have surely affected California wine for decades, if not centuries, the body of research really dates only to 2008, when major wildfires in Mendocino County brought smoke taint to the fore of wine industry consciousness. Since then, researchers from ETS, UC Davis and other institutions have put major investments into understanding this finicky, mystifying affliction.
Much mystery remains. The compounds that are markers for smoke impact occur naturally in wine grapes, so their presence alone does not indicate damage. In fact, Syrah — which is beloved for showing a deliciously smoky flavor, reminiscent of grilled meat or bacon — has such high native levels of guaiacol that ETS advises wineries not to bother submitting it for testing. The results would be meaningless.
ETS is currently working on establishing a database of baselines, Burns said. If you know what the normal, wildfirefree levels of guaiacol are in a typical Northern California Syrah, then you might have a better chance at interpreting the guaiacol levels in smoke test results.
“We don’t have the answers about how to deal with this, and nobody should be ashamed to say that,” said Bitter.
Meanwhile, while test results lag, winemakers were doing their best attempt at guesswork.
At Bricoleur Vineyards in Windsor, bits of ash were falling from the sky “like scattered snowflakes,” said owner Mark Hanson, as night harvests got under way in late August. Despite the heavy presence of ash, the fermentations so far taste smokefree, he said, though he was still awaiting test results from ETS.
Erica Stancliff, who makes wine for several different Sonoma County brands, said her vineyards were a mixed bag. One of her brands, Trombetta Family Wines, will not make any wine at all this year due to smoke. But she’d also harvested “absolutely beautiful, perfectly clean” Chardonnay from Annapolis, near the ocean. “There are definitely going to be plenty of gorgeous wines made this year from areas where smoke was not an issue,” Stancliff said.
Freeman Winery in Sebastopol will make about 30% of its typical output, said owner Ken Freeman. The Pinot Noir at his Gloria Estate Vineyard ripens earlier in the season, and it was harvested before smoke from the Walbridge Fire wafted through. But he and wife Akiko Freeman had decided not to pick the Pinot Noir at a laterripening site, the YuKi Estate Vineyard, after sending samples to a lab in Canada and watching smoke hang above the vines for days.
TwainPeterson of Bedrock voiced a fear that may feel familiar to many California residents who have resigned themselves to smokechoked skies as an annual event. Is smoke becoming such a normal part of our lives here that we’re becoming inured to it? In the absence of reliable lab testing, could small levels of smoke elude even the lasersharp palate of a winemaker?
“We’ve all had that friend who’s such a heavy smoker that they couldn’t even smell cigarette smoke anymore,” he said. “What if we’ve all become used to it, just by living in this environment?”