San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Winemakers salute ‘redemption harvest’
Bay Area winemakers will remember 2021 as the year without wildfires.
In sharp contrast to the past several years, no Wine Country estates were destroyed, no Cabernet grapes tainted by smoke, no fermentations abandoned in the wake of an emergency evacuation order. Many vintners held their breath through the last few months, knowing that the state’s deadliest fire, the 2018 Camp Fire, wasn’t extinguished until Nov. 25. Instead, the region’s autumn was smooth and easy — a brief and welcome reprieve from the serial disasters that had led this industry to fear it would never see “normal” again.
“It really was a redemption harvest,” said Montse Reece, winemaker at Pedroncelli Winery in Geyserville. “We expected the worst, we were ready, and it was fine.”
That’s not to say that the 2021 vintage didn’t bear the troubling marks of climate change. California’s extreme drought drove grape yields down — so much so that in at least one vineyard, the grapes couldn’t be harvested at all. With no
The wine crop burns at Paras Vineyards during the Nuns Fire west of downtown Napa in October 2017. The blaze burned 56,556 acres.
signs that the drought will abate anytime soon, grape growers are preparing themselves for another year of light crops that are more likely to mature in the frazzled summer heat than in the calmer, milder fall.
That larger existential crisis still
looms. But for now, industry players are taking solace where they can, and many say they’re feeling grateful for the relatively breezy year.
Some winemakers had forgotten what it was like to spend the months of August, September and
October focused on making wine, rather than on dodging fires and remedying smoky grape juice. In 2019, a significant portion of Healdsburg’s Grist Vineyard grapes went unpicked due to concerns about wildfire smoke; in 2020, none of its grapes was usable.
In 2021, finally, it made wine: “The feeling of being able to pick everything in our vineyard was so foreign,” said Woody Hambrecht, Grist’s owner.
The 2021 harvest season offered an inspiring reversal of the doomsday scenario that had begun to take hold. It turns out it’s still possible, even as climate change transforms the realities of viticulture in California, to make great wine here. Or, at least, it was still possible for one more year.
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The blows to Wine Country during the past four years just kept coming.
In 2017, a series of nearby fires ignited in early October in Napa and Sonoma counties, burning 7,000 homes and killing 45 people. The Kincade Fire in 2019 enveloped the prestigious growing area of Alexander Valley in eastern Sonoma County; the smoke emanating from that blaze spread to other parts of Wine Country, too, compromising the grapes. Aside from wildfires, heat spikes during peak harvest time — in 2017, Reece saw temperatures surge to 115 degrees — created chaotic conditions,
Signorello Estate’s Priyanka French says: “People are excited. We’re actually asking each other, ‘What are your wines tasting like?’ ”
Fire burns along a ridge near a field of grapevines along Highway 12 in 2017 in Oakmont. A series of fires ignited in Napa and Sonoma counties that year.
pushing grapes into overripe sugar levels suddenly and threatening wine quality. Then came 2020, with its nearly unfathomable levels of calamity. A lightning siege in August resulted in major fires in wine regions from Sonoma County to Monterey County, and the early timing meant that virtually all of the state’s wine grapes were still hanging on the vine, vulnerable to smoke taint. Then in late September came the Glass Fire, which damaged more than 30 Napa Valley wineries, a leveling that the region had
never seen before.
“We were all on high alert. We had this weird PTSD, feeling like something’s going to happen,” said Priyanka French, winemaker at Napa’s Signorello Estate, which burned in 2017. “But it didn’t.”
As the 2021 harvest season approached, anxieties were high. “It’s on your mind now every time you smell a fire in someone’s chimney,” said winemaker Steve Rogstad of Napa’s Brandlin Vineyard. “Six years ago, you wouldn’t have even noticed it. Now, it’s ever-present.”
Weary vintners frantically tried to prepare. Groups spoke out about what they viewed as a broken fire-insurance system for agricultural property owners. Napa locals petitioned their county for the right to hire their own firefighting aircraft. And in vineyards throughout California, people cleared brush, trimmed tree branches, moved fuel sources like propane tanks away from buildings — anything to prevent flames from finding an easy path.
Some vintners took additional steps to mitigate fire risk. Hambrecht, of the Grist Vineyard, led an effort to perform controlled burns in rural areas of the Dry Creek Valley growing region. Over the course of the year, with the approval and supervision of Cal Fire and local firefighters, the group executed five controlled burns, adding up to a total of about 200 acres.
The idea behind these burns, which were practiced regularly by Indigenous people in California, is to allow fire to consume all of the flammable material in an area in a controlled manner, making it less likely that a wildfire would be able to spread there later.
“We feel pretty strongly that these controlled burns work,” Hambrecht said. “It was incredibly empowering. Just sitting back and watching everything around us burn” — which happened in 2021, he added — “is not a position I want to be in again.”
Controlled burns are not yet commonplace in Wine Country, but the idea is gaining more traction with farmers
Montse Reece tastes from a barrel of 2020 Cabernet Sauvignon at Pedroncelli Winery in Geyserville.
“The feeling of being able to pick everything in our vineyard was so foreign.”
and other property owners. Hambrecht said he hopes more communities will explore the idea by talking to their local firefighting authority.
Not all California wine regions were as fortunate as the Bay Area’s last year. The Caldor Fire threatened the winemaking community of El Dorado County and other parts of the Sierra foothills; though no wineries were destroyed, vintners there fear that their grapes may have been unpleasantly impacted by wildfire smoke.
Napa and Sonoma counties feared their time had come, too, when a Sept. 23 blaze ignited in an open field in Carneros, near the
Woody Hambrecht, Healdsburg’s Grist Vineyard owner border of the two counties. Dubbed the Fremont Fire, it was burning near areas that had been engulfed in flames four years earlier. But the worst-case scenario did not materialize. By the next morning, the fire was fully contained. It had burned just 116 acres.
And last year, happily, temperatures remained moderate, allowing producers to pick their grapes leisurely. “It was like a Swiss watch,” said Mark Mazzoni, owner of Zialena Winery in Sonoma County.
Yet winemakers did have to contend with another meteorological problem during the 2021 growing season: drought.
The main effect of this historic drought on California vineyards could be seen in the crop yields. Less water means less energy for grapevines, which leads them to set fewer berries. Many winemakers reported that their 2021 grape hauls were about 20% lighter than normal, though it varied significantly by site.
On Napa’s Mount Veeder, certain sections of the Brandlin Vineyard threw only about half of the crop it normally does, said winemaker Steve Rogstad. Lower grape yields don’t necessarily mean that the wine will suffer; on the contrary, it can sometimes improve quality.
The severity of the drought has strengthened the case for dryfarmed vineyards, said Pedroncelli’s Reece. (There are no official statistics on how many California vineyards follow this method, but one expert has estimated that about 20% of Napa Valley vineyards are dry-farmed.) Dry farming means there is no irrigation providing water to the plants, which receive only the water that falls from the sky or is naturally stored in the ground. Grapevines that have already adapted to this sort of regimen, relying on less water to begin with, fared better in 2021 than irrigated vines, Reece said.
“We’re going to have droughts,” she continued. “In California it’s not going to be raining all the time — I assume we all understand that. Dry-farming looks better and better.”
Still, the parched soils did not detract from the sense of joyful gratitude that permeated the wine industry as its busy season came to a close.
“The concentration of flavors is so intense, like I haven’t seen in years,” Reece said of the nascent 2021 wines. Her Zinfandels are exploding with ripe, luscious deliciousness, a reminder of how great wines from the Pedroncelli vineyards can truly be, she said. Many winemakers got creative in 2020, repurposing smoke-tainted reds into piquette, grappa, vodka or rosé — making the best of a bad situation, essentially. In 2021, winemakers got to return to making normal wine, the old-fashioned way.
After all, the thrill of harvest season — picking the grapes and making them into wine — is why these professionals got into their business in the first place. “Before we got a hard dose of reality in 2017, my idea of harvest in Napa used to be this euphoric, amazing thing,” said Signorello’s French.
In 2021, finally, she felt some of that euphoria again. “You can see it just in talking to other winemakers here,” French said. “People are excited. We’re actually asking each other, ‘What are your wines tasting like?’ ”