After fires, vineyard owners, workers in same struggle

SONOMA, CALIF. — When the wildfires ignited, vineyard workers stopped picking grapes and fled for their lives. Some vineyard owners decided to stay and fight back, spending days digging firebreaks and sleeping among their vines for safety.

As the danger drew closer, grape pickers spread word of the threat and helped neighbors pack their homes. The owner of an elite golf resort abandoned his home to try to save his golf course.

The deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California history imperiled both the low-wage workers who harvest the nation’s most valuable wine grapes and the wealthy entrepreneurs who employ them. Vintners were suddenly plunged into the same desperate struggle as their laborers, with everyone fighting to preserve the things most precious to them — families, belongings and businesses.

If anything, the fires seemed to target the affluent, blackening leafy suburban developments and hilltop estates more than the flatlands where many farmworkers and middle-class families live.

Winery owners with multiple houses will take vastly different roads to recovery than the grape pickers who lost the only rental home they could hope to afford. But for a short time, fire was the great leveler in a region where the wealthiest 1 percent of people makes 20 times more than the rest.

Everybody thinks the winery owners are “rich guys and rich families, and they’re above everything,” said Adam Mariani, a fourth-generation farmer whose family runs the Scribe Winery in Sonoma. “But the truth is people are completely bootstrapping here” and worried about the effect of the fires on their livelihood.

The harvest was winding down Oct. 8 as Gonzalo Jauregui worked an overnight grape-picking shift intended to protect workers and the fruit from the heat of the day. Around 10 p.m., a gale blew into the vineyard outside of Sonoma with a strength that the 45-year-old had never seen before.

At the Scribe Winery, the winds disrupted a dinner among the vines, upending table settings. Diners who had hoped to linger over their meals were driven inside. Kelly Mariani, one of the family members there, recalled the ominous rattle of rattlesnakes in dry grass as the wind rose.

By midnight, flames had burned a neighbor’s home and were creeping down an oak ridge toward the winery buildings and family homes.

“There were hurricane winds. The house was rattling. The dog was barking,” said Adam Mariani, whose family has worked for a decade to rebuild the winery, which was eradicated during Prohibition and turned into a turkey farm.

As fires came over ridge after ridge above the wine valleys, Manuel Contreras lingered for days at a Sonoma apartment complex housing mostly migrant workers like him. He helped neighbors pack belongings and find transportation and shelters.

“I want to be the last person out,” he said.

While he spoke, firefighters and sheriff ’s deputies went house to house and business to business to warn people that the flames were expected to arrive within hours. But, Contreras said, authorities never came to tell the Spanish-speaking workers.

In all, more than 100,000 acres burned in Napa, Sonoma and Solano counties, and more than 100,000 people evacuated.

Even as the flames eased, winery employees and owners alike faced economic fears. Many had gone more than a week without work, and months of rebuilding lay ahead.

RICH PEDRONCELLI / ASSOCIATED PRESS Adam Mariani, a fourth-generation farmer whose family runs the Scribe Winery in Sonoma, walks through a charred area of the winery, which was almost destroyed. Mariani, family members and employees worked through the night to keep it from burning.