For that, blame wildfires. 

Amid the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions that limited wineries’ ability to operate, drastically reducing income for regions almost completely built on tourism, Northern California’s wine country faced another enormous setback in 2020. The Glass Fire tore through Napa and Sonoma counties, on the heels of the LNU Complex Fires that decimated areas in Mendocino, Santa Cruz and Lake counties, all of which also produce wine and supply grapes to Napa and Sonoma winemakers.

Although some of Napa’s grapes had already been harvested, a huge portion of that year’s Cabernet Sauvignon, the wine for which the area is best known for and which can sell for thousands of dollars a bottle given the right year and the right winery, was lost.

Wine growers and winemakers will feel the financial impact of that loss for years to come. But as the inevitability of future wildfires becomes all too real for the state’s massive wine industry, winemakers are looking to solutions to mitigate the worst fallout in the future, from new research to technology to better land management—including embracing fire itself.

The year 2020 was California’s worst fire season on record, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the national total acreage burned for the year. In the Glass Fire, Castello di Amorosa winery in Calistoga lost 10,000 cases (120,000 bottles). Fairwinds Estate Winery next door burned to the ground, as did Chateau Boswell in St. Helena. Cain Vineyards & Winery in Sonoma lost all of its 2019 and 2020 vintages in the blaze. Thirty wineries were physically damaged, and many more were affected by smoke and had no choice but to scrap their 2020 vintage. 

In a place as famous for its wine as Napa, it’s easy to assume that everything is owned by winemaking corporations with deep pockets like Gallo, but many wineries are small, family-owned businesses that rely on on-site sales for the bulk of their income. 

“It’s psychologically pretty terrible because you can go through this whole growing season,” says Jim Duane, winemaker for St. Helena’s family-owned Seavey Vineyard, “starting from bud break in late February, early March and have this whole great season and then get to October when everything’s basically done, and even then it can still be ruined when fires break out.”

Vineyards can actually be helpful in stopping the spread of fire. (Photo courtesy Medlock Ames Winery)

Since 2017, there has been a catastrophic series of megafires in California’s wine country. The Tubbs Fire that year burned parts of Napa and Sonoma counties. In 2018, the Mendocino Complex Fire burned Lake County, which supplies grapes to winemakers in Napa and Sonoma, and sent smoke over the valleys. The Kincade Fire demolished parts of Sonoma in 2019. But 2020’s LNU Complex and Glass fires hit the area’s wine production hardest.

It was October, and many of the grapes had already come in for the season. Chardonnay and other white wine grapes were off the vine, their juice already fermenting in tanks. Some of the red wine grapes had come in. But Cabernet Sauvignon stays on the vine longer, and most of Napa’s Cab grapes were still ripening when the Glass Fire hit. 

It’s not impossible to find California reds from 2020, and those that made it to market are exceptionally good, because of the ideal growing conditions prior to the fires. Still, Napa lost about 43 percent of its Cabernet grapes, and Sonoma lost about 30 percent of its Pinot noir grapes from the 2020 fall fires, per Wine Spectator. 

But those numbers are lower than they should be. They don’t take into account grapes that were harvested and later discarded due to smoke taint.

Fires in wine regions don’t even have to touch a vineyard to destroy grapes. The smoke can do it all on its own. Grapes have thin skins that can absorb volatile phenols released into the air when trees burn. Depending on who you ask, that can be called smoke taint or smoke effect. It’s different—much more harsh and acrid—from the appealing smoky notes wine picks up from aging in toasted oak barrels. 

The characteristics of smoke-tainted wine can vary, says Anita Oberholster, an enology specialist at the University of California, Davis. “Smokey is one, but it can also have a sweet barbecue character, a very medicinal character.” Oberholster is one of the world’s foremost experts on smoke taint, a new field of study and one with more questions than answers. “Can you imagine licking an ashtray? When wines are heavily impacted, it can taste like that.”

Somewhere around 20 percent of people can’t taste smoke taint, but for those who can, it’s overpowering. “It’s definitely unique,” says Oberholster. “If you’ve tasted it once, you’ll never forget it.” Part of her work is studying exactly how much smoke is still palatable to the consumer. “If we have those values, it will help winemakers make decisions about treatment options.” 

Sometimes, smoke taint is easy to detect in the grapes themselves, but in other instances, it doesn’t present until wine has been fermented, and sometimes, only after it’s been aged in bottles. Currently, Oberholster is working on a collaborative project to develop a sensor network across multiple sites in California, Oregon and Washington that will measure how smoke and other volatile organic compounds affect vines. “The idea of this is [to discover whether] any of the parameters that get captured by these sensors actually correlate with smoke risk.” 

If winemakers know that a certain air-quality level means smoke taint will present after fermentation, they can decide to use or scrap their grapes without the expense of harvesting and making the wine. Better access will also democratize the data, lessening the need for expensive lab tests, which can easily run in the thousands of dollars, and making it easier to provide concrete information for insurance claims. 

There are developing technologies to assist growers and winemakers, such as sprays that can be applied directly to grapes to fend off smoke damage and automated systems that allow winemakers to control tanks and other equipment remotely or with reduced staff, who often need to evacuate in wildfires depending on where they live.

But it’s a three-year financial hit to lose a vintage—and that’s just if the winery is dealing with smoke taint. When actual vines burn, a vineyard will feel the effects for six or seven years: the time it takes the vines to reach maturity, and then the time to properly age the wine before it can be released. According to the California Association of Winegrape Growers, the losses from ruined or unharvested grapes in 2020 totaled $601 million. The total loss to California’s wine industry in 2020 was $3.7 billion, according to one estimate.

Because of their lush vegetation and widely spaced plants, vineyards are actually helpful in stopping the spread of fire itself, according to Richard Casale, a post-wildfire restoration specialist who works with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. “Grapevines are very resilient,” he says. “I can say from experience, they do not burn easily in most cases. They’re well pruned. There’s no dead wood, and the green leaves hold a certain amount of moisture. They’re almost like mini-fire breaks on the landscape.”

Indeed, one way to avoid devastating megafires in areas such as California’s wine country may be to embrace smaller fires.

“Fire is a natural part of those ecosystems,” says Alison Blodorn, Ph.D., principal forestry program manager for the Napa County Resource Conservation District, which provides technical and financial support to the community and educates people about being better stewards of the land.

She says that much of Northern California is a “fire-adapted space,” but one that hasn’t been allowed to have smaller, naturally occurring wildfires. Those lower-intensity fires reduce the underbrush that fuels megafires.

“The situation we’re dealing with is a result of 200 years of fire suppression, which has led to overstocked forests that aren’t healthy or able to withstand fire as they should be able to,” she says. “With compounding heat and drought and other stressors, it’s created a really challenging environment.” 

Napa RCD promotes conservation as a whole, but its work in fire resilience started after the 2017 wine country fires. “There’s just a huge need, particularly with so many vineyards having large amounts of forested property surrounding their vines,” says Blodorn. “Much of that forested land has not received the kind of care that it needs to be healthy and fire resilient.”

Napa RCD’s Forest Health team works with landowners to develop forest management plans and connect them to funding to implement vegetation management activities, improving the overall health and fire resilience of their forests.

“You never know when the next fire’s going to come, and we are all bracing ourselves every season,” adds Blodorn. “It can be hard for landowners because it’s not a fast process to go through, developing a plan for your property, seeking the funding, securing the funding, getting contractors out to do the work. We’re not going to fix 200 years of inaction in a year or two years. It’s really a long game that we’re playing here.” 

When the Kincade Fire burned part of his property and claimed a huge portion of his 2019 harvest, Ames Morison, co-founder of Sonoma’s Medlock Ames Winery, had to do some soul searching. 

“I always thought organic was the right thing and that I was doing enough, but that fire made me rethink everything,” says Morison. Most of the 340-acre ranch is undeveloped, and Morison purposely kept it that way for 25 years. “My philosophy before was, ‘let’s just let that be in its native, wild state; that’s the best way to preserve nature,’ but it’s already disturbed by our presence here. By doing nothing, it’s actually worse than actively managing it.”

Ames Morison of Medlock Ames Winery was forced to reconsider his hands-off approach after a wildfire in 2019. (Photo courtesy Medlock Ames Winery)

Morison added streamlined processes into the winery after the Kincade Fire, but his main focus has been on being a more conscientious steward of the land and understanding his role as a property owner. “It was this devastating thing, but it made us learn a lot about wildfire and why it happens and understand that it’s actually part of California’s ecology,” he says. “It’s a very powerful force, but it belongs here and we’re just in its land. We need to respect it and try to figure out how to work with it rather than fight it.”

Fred Seavey, part of the family-owned Seavey Vineyards, has a similar philosophy about ecological stewardship. After his family’s ranch burned in the 2017 Tubbs Fire, he became much more active in caring for their land. He took a forestry class at UC Davis, and worked with a registered professional forester to create a forest management plan. “Our goal is to try to make our forest more fire resilient, climate change resilient and drought resilient,” he says. For Seavey, that includes changing the footprint of the vineyards to allow sheep to graze under the vines and keep the undergrowth down, as well as creating burn piles. Last winter, he estimates he burned 225 of them across the ranch. Seavey says he intentionally kept them small, less than 20 square feet per fire, because bigger fires can create hydrophobic soil that won’t absorb water and isn’t hospitable to new growth. 

He has also volunteered on prescribed burns, which eliminate vegetation under the tree canopy and reduce the risk of small fires growing out of control. Many communities in California have Prescribed Burn Associations, but Napa is just in the process of forming its association now. 

“It just feels meaningful to be able to do it in a very concrete way with your own hands and see the effects on your immediate surrounding environment,” says Seavey.

To proactively protect grapes, Seavey winemaker Duane also periodically sprays his grapes with a clay mixture to prevent smoke taint and protect the grape skins—which can burn in sunlight just like a sunburn—and keep their internal temperature cooler. 

In the winery, he added in newer systems to process wine, such as dedicated pumps on each tank, which make the process more automated and ensure the time-sensitive winemaking process can continue in the event that some workers can’t make it in due to fires. An issue often left out of the conversation about wildfire impact on winemaking is the crews who harvest the grapes, who make the bulk of their annual income during September and October. Winemakers and vineyard owners interviewed in this story all stressed that worker safety is paramount and they would never require employees to come to work in a dangerous situation. More automated systems can fill the gap in emergencies where a fire may be blocking the route to work or a worker’s neighborhood is being evacuated. 

Fire, says Duane, “is a big problem. It’s tough to solve, but I think there’s no easy grand solution. It’s going to be people trying to do all these different individual mitigating factors.”

Casale says that he’s seeing more interest in wildfire management and restoration than ever before.

“I would say definitely there is more consciousness now,” he adds. “It’s not like fires are going away. Every year, we see the largest fires in California’s history, then the next year comes along, and then we have the next largest fire in California. We’re not seeing fires in the tens of thousands of acres. We’re seeing them in the hundreds of thousands of acres now.”

But he also sees positive momentum for the future. “I tell the growers it’s an opportunity to build back better with fire-resistant materials and to look at it in a whole new light.” 

Despite many businesses investing huge amounts of time and effort into fire resistance, they’re finding it hard to maintain the insurance that will see them through a natural disaster. Many insurance companies are refusing to renew policies for vineyards that have experienced loss from wildfire, and others are increasing premiums to unaffordable levels. Jim Duane says that Seavey’s insurance tripled from 2022 to 2023, despite all of the preventative improvements. 

Part of Anita Oberholster’s work, too, is establishing better information for insurance companies to utilize when offering crop insurance. “We don’t have baseline numbers for what is normal for different regions and varieties in the US,” she says. “Something we’ve been working on since 2021 is getting what is the normal range for these compounds in grapes without smoke exposure. Because we don’t have that data yet, crop insurance providers haven’t adapted their numbers because they don’t know what to adapt them to.”

“Right now, we’re in a cycle of regulate, retreat, regulate, retreat. There is this entire space in between regulate and retreat, which is partner, innovate, collaborate,” says Jennifer Gray Thompson, founder and CEO of After the Fire, a nonprofit that helps communities in Northern California rebuild by providing aid, information and resources to residents and businesses, as well as advocating for those people to policy-makers.

A large part of Thompson’s work is trying to educate insurance companies about the preventative strategies businesses are employing—everything from applying flame-resistant paint to changing landscaping away from plants that easily ignite to implementing wildfire-resistant modeling. “One of the things that insurance doesn’t recognize enough is what’s actually true about wineries and vineyards, which is that they’re great firebreaks.”

Like many others, Thompson understands that we can’t eradicate wildfire—we just need to learn better strategies to manage it. 

“The number one thing for people to understand is we do have to live alongside wildfire,” she says. Accepting wildfire and working with it could be key in preventing more serious megafires. “It is an absolute necessity moving forward. We have no choice.”

This story is part of State of Abundance, a five-part series about California agriculture and climate change. See the full series here.

The post Why California Wineries are Embracing Fire to Avoid Disaster appeared first on Modern Farmer.

There’s a huge downside to using own-rooted vines, though. If they get attacked by phylloxera, the entire crop will die. It won’t be a loss of just one season’s grapes—the entire vineyard itself will be totally destroyed. And the invasive species is present in the soil in vineyards throughout America. In fact, phylloxera nearly wiped out French wine grapes more than a century ago. The fix was to graft European vitis vinifera vines onto American rootstock, which can withstand the root damage from phylloxera. It’s also how European varieties of wine grapes can thrive in America.

But Santa Ynez Valley, a winemaking region on California’s Central Coast, is uniquely suited to keep phylloxera at bay. Just 125 miles north of Los Angeles, the valley’s relatively low rainfall and high average temperatures help foster an inhospitable environment to the pest. But more than anything, it’s the soil. Santa Ynez Valley is only 35 miles inland from Santa Barbara’s coastline. 

“This is beach sand at the top of every one of these hills,” says Noah Rowles, gesturing to the 250 acres of his Thompson Vineyard. “It’s literally like hourglass sand. The last time the ocean was at its highest, this was the top of the Pacific.” Rowles has 43 acres of Rhone varietal grapes such as Grenache and Syrah, which he uses to make his Dovecote wine. The vineyard has been all own-rooted since it was first planted in 1989 by the original owners.

Noah Rowles on his vineyard. Photography Courtesy of Dovecote Estate Winery.

Even though own-rooted vines are vulnerable to phylloxera, there are huge advantages to growing plants on their own roots, rather than on the more commonly used grafted stock. They display a hardiness and stability that allows them to survive better in times of drought and extreme heat. That innate balance likely comes from the fact that own-rooted plants are higher vigor, meaning that the plants themselves and the roots tend to grow bigger than lower-vigor grafted stock. Vigor is a primary concern with grapevines, in particular, because high-vigor vines produce more leaf canopy, and they grow more grapes — which, counterintuitively, is bad for wine. The fewer grapes a vine produces, the more concentrated the flavor and the better the wine in the bottle. Traditional viticultural wisdom is to plant low-vigor vines, which inherently produce fewer grapes, and then intentionally stress them to further concentrate their fruit by providing just enough water and nutrients to survive. 

While the grapes grown from grafted rootstock produce excellent wine, the vines are fragile. They take a lot of resources to maintain and are especially susceptible to external factors like weather. Even in the best of circumstances, the plants tend to die out, although the time frames vary wildly. Some die after 30 years, while others last much longer.  

It’s not exactly known why phylloxera isn’t as much of an issue in the Santa Ynez Valley, but Chris Greer, PhD, a University of California integrated pest management advisor, has some theories. Greer points to a 1928 USDA study. “It’s almost 100 years old,” he says, “but it’s a pretty extensive study on phylloxera infestation in California as related to types of soils. It’s pretty much saying the same thing that most people are saying today … In sandier soils, it’s less of a problem.” 

Greer says that it’s not precisely clear why phylloxera doesn’t thrive in sandier soils; it’s likely that the elements in clay soil that allows it to live—cracks in the topsoil for easy burrowing and air pockets beneath the surface—aren’t present. Sandy soil is coarser and tends to settle in on itself, so there are fewer places for the pests to burrow into and fewer places for them to live once they do.

“This thing doesn’t move long distances on its own, like some of our other pests,” Greer adds. “So if you think about having a vineyard that doesn’t have phylloxera, you’re probably in pretty good shape if you can keep it out of there.”

Photography courtesy of Blair Fox.

That’s what Tyler Thomas, winemaker and president of Dierberg and Star Lane Vineyards, is doing. He keeps both own-rooted and grafted stock relatively close to each other in Star Lane’s vineyards, but he isn’t substantially concerned with contamination. The winery’s growing area in Happy Canyon is isolated, and the vineyard propagates new vines from existing plants on the property rather than buying from a nursery. Risk of a problematic pest finding its way into the vineyard is low. 

What started with a few blocks of Cabernet grapes has now become Cab, Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, totaling about 22 acres of own-rooted vines. “When I first told my colleagues from Sonoma and Napa that I had own-rooted Cab, they were like ‘is it dead yet?’ That’s sort of the default assumption,” says Thomas. “And it’s actually doing very, very well. You do not need to be an expert to look at the vines and say, ‘something’s different here.’” 

Blair Fox, owner and winemaker of Blair Fox Cellars, own-roots Syrah, Zinfandel and Petite Sirah at his vineyard in Los Olivos. “We were seeing a lot of incompatibility issues with Syrah on other rootstocks around the county—around the state, really,” says Fox. So he started own-rooting and has seen a level of stability and fortitude with the own-rooted plants that he doesn’t see with grafted stocks.

Fox is also head winemaker at Fess Parker Winery, also in the valley. Whereas other vineyards he works with see variation in crop yields and canopy growth on grafted vines, his own-rooted vines and those he’s planted at Fess Parker show steadier results. 

There are many contributing factors, such as location, geography of the vineyard, micro-climate and soil composition, but he believes that own-rooted vines in Santa Ynez County do tend to thrive, especially over the droughts and extreme heat waves in the last few years. “They react better to drought. They react better to heat stress. They react better to basically all the problems that we’re seeing now,” says Fox. “I’m seeing vines on other rootstocks actually shutting down, because I think that rootstock itself is not able to handle the lack of water or the extreme heat.” 

Noah Rowles at Dovecote also sees less variation from year to year in the ripening timeline and overall crop yields. “What I hear from other farmers and winemakers is that own-rooted vines are more normalized,” he says. Because they survive better in drought, they produce more grapes in drought years than plants that need more water. In rainy, high-yield years, they produce fewer grapes. “You have less variation in yield from vintage to vintage,” he says. 

Own-rooted blocks are easier to keep alive than grafted stock, which necessarily has scar tissue because of the graft. They have a hardy root structure, and if one single plant starts to fail, it’s simple to take a clipping from nearby and propagate it. That way, you’re not spending money on new plants, and you’re not exposing the ecosystem to new invasive species. 

“When they’re allowed to be connected to their own roots, plants are going to survive indefinitely,” says Rowles. “That’s one of the things I love about own-rooted sites. If a vine gets a disease or needs to be replaced, you just bring in a cane from the neighboring vine and put it down into the soil and just continue on. 

“With rootstock, you have to replant every 20, 30, 40 years,” he adds. “That’s a huge amount of resources that have to be put in every time you restart. It’s tons of waste.”

Photography courtesy George Rose.

Economics were definitely a contributing factor for Max Marshak’s decision to plant own-rooted vines at Refugio Ranch Vineyards and Roblar Winery. He is winemaker for both wineries, in Los Olivos and Santa Ynez, respectively, and for Buttonwood Farm Winery in Solvang, a totally own-rooted estate winery the company recently acquired.  

“The primary benefit for me is that it makes us self-reliant in many ways,” says Marshak. “Most of modern viticulture, if someone wants to plant or replant a vineyard, they’re at the mercy of a limited number of nurseries who provide rootstock … They’re buying bench-grafted vines that can cost $5 apiece. The cost benefit to being able to propagate your own vines from cuttings is fantastic.” Vine density varies by grower, but Marshak is planting more than 2,000 vines per acre—grafted stock would cost the winery about $10,000 per acre in plants alone. Across Refugio’s 27 acres, that’s a substantial investment.

The own-rooted blocks of Grenache at Refugio aren’t in sandy soil, they’re in a low-lying river plane by the Santa Ynez River. What’s keeping pests out of the area, says Marshak, is the vines’ ability to propagate themselves, so no new, potentially contaminated outside plants come in. “In the spring, they push new shoots out without us even having to worry about them,” he says. “Because the genetic material goes right down into the soil, the chances for it to reproduce itself are high. There’s a resilience built into the own-rooted system that we really like.”  Those vines, he explains, “tend to get established more rapidly and tend to grow more vigorously. That extra hardiness and durability is a real advantage as vineyards age.” 

Tyler Thomas from Star Lane says there are lessons to be learned from own-rooted farming that can be applied to viticulture in Santa Ynez Valley more broadly. He estimates that his own-rooted plants use about half the water of grafted stock. “They’re forecasting about a 15% drop in precipitation in this area in the next 25 years,” he says. “That’s really altering how we think about redevelopment strategies. We want a healthy vine that we control the stress [level of], not a vine that’s stressed because it’s unhealthy.” 

Seeing those plants thrive under climate stress has shifted his thinking for grafted stock. “The own-rooted vines have taught us it’s OK and safe in this area for us to use much more vigorous rootstock than were originally planted,” he says. Seeing vines with bigger, water-scavenging root systems produce high quality wines, when all winemaking wisdom has traditionally said the opposite, is opening his mind to possibilities for a future with increasingly unpredictable weather and scarce resources. 

“We have done some replanting in the last couple of years where we have not necessarily used own-rooted vines, but we’ve used the same principle and selected higher-vigor rootstocks than the original plantings” in Star Lane Vineyard, he explains. “We’ve seen those vines establish more quickly, we’ve seen that they don’t acquire as much irrigation or nutrition. That means  pumping less water out of the ground, which is better for the water table, but [it] also requires less carbon emissions. And we’ve made some wine off of those new developments now, and it’s excellent.

“I think it’s a way to advance quality in our area,” says Thomas. “Those kinds of rootstock really should be where we move toward, I think.”

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