The growing threat of fires has shaken the Napa valley wine industry, as fears of smoke-spoiled grapes and soaring insurance rates put vintners on edge
Elton Slone and his colleagues at the Robert Craig Winery in Napa valley had gathered for their annual pre-harvest company party last week – complete with copper pot carnitas and grape tacos – when one of his co-workers noticed an alert on her phone. The Pickett fire, a blaze that had started about 10 miles (16km) away near the town of Calistoga, was moving toward their vineyards on Howell Mountain.
Knowing that the Glass fire – a 2020 blaze that damaged numerous wineries and spoiled a year’s harvest – had burned along the same path, Slone hoped no fuel remained for this new fire. “But that was not the case,” he said. Within the week, the winery’s Candlestick Vineyard would become “a sacrificial lamb for the town of Angwin” when firefighters lit a controlled burn on their property to control the larger fire.
Vineyards can make excellent fire breaks because they are typically clear of burnable plant matter, and grape vines themselves are moist enough to be nonflammable. But heat damage and smoke can still destroy a crop.
The Robert Craig Winery lost the entire crop of their Candlestick Vineyard, which would have generated $4.5m in revenue. Slone estimates about 10% of the vines will need to be replanted – a process that will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a decade to see new bottles of wine ready for market. The team will test grapes on another one of their vineyards closer to harvest to see whether the smoke affected them.
The loss comes at the end of the growing season – after Slone’s vineyard had sunk nearly $1m into farming costs – and is made even more devastating because it’s happened before. The memories of the 2020 Glass fire and 2018 Camp fire, which burned farther east but still sent smoke to blanket Napa’s grapevines, are still fresh. “It’s financially a devastating situation,” said Slone.
The still-burning Pickett fire, which began on 21 August in northern Napa county, quickly burned through 6,800 acres (2,750 hectares), making it the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest wildfire this year. Preliminary estimates show that it caused $65m in agricultural losses, largely to wine grape growers, affecting about 1,500 acres (610 hectares) of agricultural land.
Although that damage is significantly less than that wrought by the Glass fire – which burned through 67,000 acres (27,000 hectares) and racked up $3.7bn in losses – the growing threat of wildfires in arid California has still shaken the wine industry.
“Northern California wine country is one of the treasures of the United States,” said Slone. “It’s something that I think all Americans should be concerned about because it’s a uniquely American thing.”
‘Tastes like a campfire’
Along the west coast, wine grape growers have implemented many strategies to prepare for wildfires – with the support of scientists at the US Department of Agriculture and local universities.
Ben Montpetit, chair of the University of California, Davis’s viticulture and enology department, said in an emailed statement that the industry has employed “barrier sprays to reduce smoke uptake, annual testing to establish baseline smoke marker levels in grapes, and small-lot fermentations after smoke events to assess potential wine impact”.
“Researchers are also investigating which grape cultivars are more sensitive or tolerant to smoke exposure,” he added.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in the preparedness realm,” said Natalie Collins, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, who noted the industry established a smoke exposure taskforce after the losses in 2018 to aid growers after wildfires.
The existence of that taskforce hints at a perennial problem for vineyards: though they can often keep wildfire off their acres, there’s little that can keep smoke at bay. And if smoke sits in an area for too long, it can leave grapes tasting ashy, like a campfire.
“Smoke taint issues are kind of fickle,” said Heather Griffin, a partner at Summit Lake Vineyards and Winery. “It depends on the varietal, depends on your ripeness level and depends on how long the exposure was.”
Griffin’s family’s vineyards were saved from the Pickett fire – “They stopped the fire at the end of our ridge up on Howell Mountain,” she said – but they’ll need to send grapes out for testing before harvest to be sure the smoke didn’t taint it.
Protecting the industry
For the first year ever, crop insurers are offering a new coverage option called the fire insurance protection smoke index endorsement, which would insure vineyards for losses due to smoke exposure.
But some growers say the cost of crop insurance has become unattainable after repeated wildfires.
“Our insurance went up so much after the fires of 2020. It literally went from $40,000 a year for really great coverage for all of our properties and inventory, and now it’s $300,000 a year and covers nothing,” said Slone.
For the 95% of Napa valley’s wineries that are family-owned, that cost can be “catastrophic”, he adds.
The wine industry has historically relied on federal funding to support USDA and university research into wildfire preparedness. Although those levels have remained steady despite widespread federal cuts, eight federal wine grape research scientists – including a smoke exposure specialist – were fired and then rehired early in the Trump administration’s Doge-era cuts.
“We want to make sure that an industry like ours continues to be protected,” said Collins, as “we continue to see the writing on the wall in California that wildfires likely will continue to be an issue here”.
It’s possible that some federal disaster relief funding may work its way to affected vineyards, but Griffin says buying wine from those wineries “helps everybody that’s up here”.
“Shoot them an email and buy some of their wine,” added Slone. “They will be the most appreciative people on the planet Earth.”
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