The Napa fires: A near-extinction event for California wine
“California’s wine country has entered a new, dangerous era,” said Esther Mobley in the San Francisco Chronicle. Napa Valley, America’s most celebrated wine region, was struck in late September by the most destructive fire in its history, a blaze that reduced wineries to rubble and turned the valley into “an eerie landscape of charred earth.” But the disaster was not a one-off. The 2020 fire season has left few wine regions untouched, and it confirmed that devastating fires fueled by climate change have become part of the new normal. Up to 80 percent of Napa’s cabernet sauvignon grapes may have been destroyed by fire or smoke this year, and the implications of such losses “ripple through every facet of life here.” The wine industry has rebounded before, but “the disasters of 2020 have thrown it into existential crisis.”
“Almost every aspect of wine production is touched by these disasters,” said Tim Carl in The Washington Post. Wine lovers everywhere will see the effects in shortages and higher prices, and not just because of grapes cooked on their vines. The fires destroy multimillion-dollar equipment and wine stored in barrels and bottles. Worse, grapes even miles from a fire can absorb foul tastes from smoke and soot, and the ruinous flavor sometimes isn’t detectable until the wine has aged. Insurance costs rise accordingly. Tourists may return next year, but if the immigrant farmworkers who cultivate and harvest the grapes disappear, no one should blame them. As long as wildfires continue to make work in California unreliable and hazardous to the workers’ health, the new normal will “force them to look for jobs in more stable environments.”