Can We Save Wine from Wildfires?

Although many wine drinkers remained blissfully unaware of this addition to the already heavy toll of wildfires, it was disastrous for winemakers. One analyst concluded that the 2020 wildfires cost California’s wine industry nearly four billion dollars, an amount that includes both direct damage from the fires and lost sales from smoke exposure. “We had only imported twenty tons of Sauvignon Blanc and had to assume that everything else was ruined,” Egelhoff said. “It was a lost vintage.” The hundreds of thousands of tons of California grapes left unharvested that year alone were worth more than six hundred million dollars. Oregon suffered similarly. “For a few days the sky was red, then there was no sky,” Zolnikov said. “It was just solid smoke.” He carefully cleaned all the ash from his vines before harvest, but when winemakers shared the bottles they made with his grapes, they still tasted acrid and smoky.

Obviously, the best way to prevent smoke odor would be to prevent wildfires in the first place. Meanwhile, the wine industry is desperate to protect its grapes. As 2020 drew to a close, a trio of West Coast researchers: Tom Collins, of Washington State University; Elizabeth Tomasino, of Oregon State University; and Anita Oberholster of the University of California, Davis, have proposed an ambitious, “smoke to glass” effort aimed at finding an answer. “This year has clearly shown that we need to be better prepared,” Tomasino told me. The USDA, which normally has a puritanical reluctance to fund research that could be used by the beer, wine and spirits industry, awarded the team $7.65 million in 2021. “As devastating as 2020 was, that’s the silver lining,” said Egelhoff, who remembers sending the trio “a very angry email” that year, complaining about the lack of help researchers. “It really pushed them to find the solutions we needed.” »

In September, I joined Collins and a group of students on a trip to Washington State University’s experimental wineries in the Yakima Valley. It was early in the morning and two sunrises lit the horizon. The false dawn to the north was a forest fire: during the night, lightning had ignited the dry grasses of Rattlesnake Ridge, giving the hills around us an eerie relief. It was a cruel reminder of why we had woken up at this hour. Before the morning was over, we simulated our own range fire to study the impact of smoke on the wine grapes.

Collins conducts the most impressive smoke odor experiments in the country. While the Tomasino, Oregon, team works with a handful of vines at a time, Collins smokes the equivalent of a quarter-acre of vines in large greenhouses, allowing him to approximate real-world conditions and produce a decent amount of truly terrible wine. (Sadly, Oberholster died of cancer last year.) Each house holds two hundred Merlot vines, and once we arrived, we began pulling shade cloths over them, accompanied by a portable speaker pumping out Fleetwood Mac. Three of the houses were to remain smoke-free, as an experimental control. In three other cases, we used ties to hang large pieces of ventilated plastic pipe along each row of vines, directly under the clusters of purple grapes.

Cartoon by Zachary Kanin

The students and I wrangled tarps and tie-downs while Collins, who volunteers with the Boy Scouts, gave instructions peppered with gentle ribbing and reminders to hydrate. He took care of the pipes and connected them to three broken grilles. The light turned salmon, then gold as we worked. Collins instructed students to gather a few clusters and leaves for pre-smoke sampling, but to avoid vines with pink or orange labels because they had been treated with an experimental barrier spray. Finally, with the samples safely stored in a cooler, Collins opened the grills, burned a few pellets inside, and watched the smoke spread. I stuck my nose through a crack in one of the houses as it filled with an acrid mist: the pellets were hand-made from more than a dozen local rangeland species, including sagebrush, cheatgrass, and dry mustard, all painstakingly collected by the summer interns.

Although fire has been humanity’s constant companion and wine probably predates most cultures, smoke-contaminated wine appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon. “People weren’t really aware of it, but it probably had happened,” Mango Parker, a senior research scientist at the Australian Wine Research Institute, told me. She pointed me to a reference in an Italian oenology textbook from 1892, which cites “smoky taste” as a potential wine defect – fortunately “found more rarely in Italian wines than in German wines.”