Smoke-flavored cabernet
Much of Napa Valley’s 2020 vintage was ruined by raging wildfires, said Benjamin Wallace in New York magazine. Climate change threatens the future of Napa’s wine industry.
ANITA OBERHOLSTER WOULDN’T say what we were drinking. We were standing in the teaching-and-research winery at the University of California, Davis, the country’s preeminent incubator of future grape growers and vintners, and on the table in front of us were three identical wine bottles with red screw caps. Instead of a label, each bore a white strip that read “sample for research,” along with a cryptic string of letters and numbers.
The bottles, which came from vineyards in the Napa Valley, contained cabernet sauvignon from the 2020 vintage. They had all been made from grapes harvested after the Glass Fire, a blaze that tore through Napa, burning almost 68,000 acres and turning the skies orange. When trees burn, lignin, a chemical compound that gives wood much of its structure, releases into the smoke a range of volatile phenols, a class of airborne molecules. Grapes aren’t the only crop that can be affected by smoke, but their permeable skins, and the very sensitivity that allows vintners to produce expressive, complex wines, make them uniquely vulnerable. Oberholster, an exacting South African– born chemist at UC Davis’ Department of Viticulture and Enology, is the closest thing California has to an expert on smoke and wine, and after the fire died down, wineries began sending her clusters of grapes and samples of wine in the desperate hope that she could help them prepare for the next disaster.
Oberholster poured samples of the three wines, and we both picked up the leftmost glass and stuck our noses in. I didn’t smell anything smoky. “They’re a bit cold, unfortunately,” she said. Cold means less volatile, which means less aromatic. These grapes were picked from a hillside where the Glass Fire had come right up to the vineyard but the smoke hadn’t lingered. “There is smoke there,” Oberholster continued, “but you need to look for it.” I spat the wine into a blue pail and took another sip. A stale, ashy flavor began to emerge. Would she consider this an extremely tainted wine? “It goes through phases,” she said. “Currently, it’s medium.”
Lifting the second glass to my nose, I thought I detected bacon. I took a sip. The flavor seemed stunted, as if it were about to reveal itself but then decided it would rather not. I sniffed again. Now the wine smelled like a spent, day-old cigarette. This wine’s grapes came from the Napa Valley floor, Oberholster said, where the smoke from the Glass Fire had lingered for days.
The third cabernet smelled better than the others. When the wine first touched my tongue, it tasted like something in the vicinity of berry juice. “Because there’s a lot there to mask,” Oberholster said, meaning the wine’s other qualities—its fruit and tannins and acid—were strong enough to compete with any smoke compounds, at least initially. Sure enough, the longer the wine was in my mouth, the more sooty and dead it tasted and the more I wanted to spit it out.
Major wildfires first seriously threatened a California wine region—Mendocino County—in 2008, but not until 2017 did they pose a significant danger to the state’s most hallowed vines. That October, a string of fires—including the Tubbs Fire, the most destructive in state history up to that point—burned more than 110,700 acres in Napa and Sonoma counties. “People wanted to say, ‘Oh, smoke taint doesn’t exist,’” Alisa Jacobson, a winemaker who would later help form the West Coast Smoke Exposure Task Force, told me. “They didn’t want the media or anyone to think they were going to get smoke in their wines.”
The 2020 fires were a turning point for Napa’s grape growers and winemakers. The first of them hit earlier in the season than the 2017 fires had, and many grapes were vulnerable because they hadn’t yet been harvested. And when the Glass Fire arrived in late September, it devastated the later-ripening varieties still on the vine—in particular, cabernet sauvignon, the grape with which Napa is almost synonymous and the basis for California’s preeminent luxury export.
As we got ready to leave the tasting room, Oberholster gave me one of the bottles of cabernet sauvignon to take back to my hotel so I could try the wine after it warmed up. “Pour yourself a glass,” she said, “and see if you can get through it before it starts getting extremely off-putting.”
‘DEER PARK WAS just leveled,” Alan Viader recalled. It was a morning in mid-February, and we were on the crest of the hill overlooking the main vineyard at Viader Winery, a 4,000-case direct-to-consumer producer founded by Viader’s mother, Delia, in Napa in the late 1980s.
Viader was talking about the Glass Fire, which had started before dawn on Sept.
27, 2020. The fire originated near the winery and quickly made its way around the reservoir at its foot, then started burning up the hill, accelerated by dry grass on the vineyard floor and pushed along by the wind. Viader was at his home 15 miles south of the winery, and when he was finally able to get to the property the following night, fallen trees on the ground were still burning. The Glass Fire was not fully extinguished for 23 days. Afterward, Viader and his crew went vine by vine, cutting into each one to check its health and make sure the sap was flowing. Most of the cabernet franc vines survived because they were further from the flames, but the vines of cabernet sauvignon grapes, which anchor the Viaders’ wine, were decimated.
Viader is still going back and forth with his insurance company over how much of his losses it will cover. Until 2020, vineyards themselves, being lush and irrigated and manicured, were considered firebreaks not requiring extensive coverage. Like a lot of other winemakers in his situation, Viader didn’t get his policy renewed. The best he can hope for is a much smaller umbrella courtesy of the state’s FAIR Plan program, which he says won’t insure more than $3 million.
After the Glass Fire, Viader began preparing for the next time. We passed a pile of what looked like industrial-strength Super Soakers: They were “water axes,” gaspowered, high-pressure pumps with firehose nozzles that can shoot a blast of flamedousing water a hundred feet. In January, Viader enrolled in the local firefighting academy to become a volunteer, and today he wore a fire-dispatch scanner on his belt.
However diligent Viader’s preparations for flames, there’s much less he can do to guard against smoke, which can come from anywhere, including the properties of less fire-savvy winemakers. When fires swept through Northern California in 2020, casting shifting palls of smoke for more than two months, other winemakers were forced to make agonizing decisions about whether to even bother producing their wines. Napa has the most expensive farmland in the U.S., and the surest way to profit is to make pricey bottles of cabernet; once you’re selling a luxury product, though, even minor imperfections can be fatal. “Maybe at $20 you’re OK with a little smoke impact,” said Jacobson, who, at the time, was a winemaker at Joel Gott Wines, “but at the $200 price point, you’re not OK with any.”
CALIFORNIA WINE IS a $40 billion–plus industry, but only in the past few years has anybody paid much attention to the threat of smoke. To the extent that smoke taint had received scholarly scrutiny, the papers all came from the University of Adelaide in Australia, where Oberholster, the daughter of a wheat and canola farmer, happened to have obtained her graduate degree. Australia had been dealing with smoke taint since 2003, but there was a lot the Australians didn’t know, and not everything they did know applied to California.
From her colleagues in Australia, Oberholster learned that it isn’t enough to test grapes for the volatile compounds detectable right away; one also has to test for the compounds that reveal themselves only months later, when fermentation unbinds the phenol-sugar compounds and releases the volatile phenols and their smoky flavors. She had to inform devastated grape growers that there are no easy or one-size-fits-all fixes. Unless growers know exactly where the smoke in their vineyards came from, how long it was there, and exactly when it was created, its impact on their grapes will be unpredictable: One could have a vineyard next to a fire, but grapes 20 miles away could be more affected because of wind direction or topography.
The best thing a grower could do, Oberholster said, was something that had been tried in Australia: Ferment a small batch of wine in a bucket and have a panel of tasters assess it—ideally five or more, as a certain percentage of tasters either don’t taste smoke taint or are overly sensitive to it. People used to alchemizing $1,500 cabs in state-of-the-art steel vats, in other words, might have to resort to making wine in a plastic pail.
As if smoke and fire weren’t bad enough, the prized Napa cab, as we know it, is facing an even greater existential threat. As temperature extremes have become more common in recent years, the world’s wine maps have begun to shift. We now have Chinese cab blends, Norwegian rieslings, and critic-pleasing English sparkling wines. And regions where quality has historically fluctuated with vintage—depending on that year’s weather—have been consistently producing good wine year after year. “Some of that’s better winemaking equipment and techniques,” Massican Wines’ Dan Petroski said. “But a big part of it is weather.”
After the 2017 fire in Napa raised questions about whether climate change was to blame, Petroski, who had been the winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards since 2012, winning accolades including the San Francisco Chronicle’s Winemaker of the Year, took it upon himself to go into the winery’s records and track the dates of the growing season for the previous 10 years. Without anyone noticing, it seemed, the season had shifted one month forward over that period, the vines hitting peak ripeness earlier and earlier each year.
Petroski saw several causes. For instance, since a big replanting in 2007, Larkmead had been growing healthier vines. But climate was undeniably a factor, too, and Petroski began to believe cabernet sauvignon’s days in Napa might be numbered. With the owner’s blessing, Petroski decided to plant research vines on the property using great wines from warmer climates as his guide. “If someone comes in here and says, ‘Why are you planting tempranillo?’ I’d say, ‘Sorry, bro, don’t you know about Vega Sicilia? It’s $800 a bottle, and it’s tempranillo and cabernet.’ And if they ask, ‘Why are you planting touriga nacional?’ I’d say, ‘You’re not familiar with Barca Velha? It’s only been made 19 times in the past 100 years, and it’s $500 a bottle. It’s one of the greatest wines in the world.’”
When he started talking about cabernet losing its throne, Petroski said, “my nickname became Doomsday Dan.” Today, lots of Napa wineries are undertaking similar experiments.
Viader told me that, after the Glass Fire, he started shifting his wines toward the fresher, more acidic, lower-alcohol style his mother had made when she was first starting out; these wines can be made from grapes picked earlier, shortening their exposure to fire risk. And though he was less pessimistic about the future of cabernet, Viader was setting aside 10 percent of the vineyard to experiment with varieties like malbec, grenache, tempranillo, and touriga nacional.
Some winemakers think their best option is leaving Napa entirely. Last year, after nearly two decades working in Napa, Jacobson, the former Gott winemaker, moved 360 miles south and bought two vineyards in the Santa Ynez Valley. “Santa Barbara has been relatively smoke free the last 10 years,” she said. “That wasn’t an accident.” There’s more water in the ground in Santa Barbara, so even without rain, the vines have more to drink; land is cheaper, and Santa Ynez doesn’t have as many big forests, which, if they catch fire, create the blankets of dense smoke that spell doom for nearby grapes.
In 2020, when Jacobson still worked at Gott, she had to evacuate her home during one of the fires. “There’s been an evacuation every year since 2017,” she told me. “We keep saying, ‘It’s a wild year,’ but now we say that every year. It’s getting pretty old.”
A version of this story was originally published in New York magazine. Used with permission.