Dispatches From the Dirt: The Waiting Game
Surrendering control.
Words and Images by Jillian Riley
After fires broke out on Sunday less than a mile from the winery, we waited on baited breath. That evening, I fell asleep with the phone in my hand, checking news and trying to follow maps of the fire. My phone was pinging until 1 AM with text messages from my mother, ensuring I wasn’t in the path of the blaze.
The next day, I spoke to our assistant winemaker, whose casual, laid-back demeanor was absent. His voice was soft and almost mournful.
“All that work. . . so much work for nothing.”
News had come that day that the restaurant at the renowned Meadowood resort had burnt to the ground. Meadowood sat less than a mile from our winery. While we weren’t allowed near the property, we knew this development didn’t bode well. We couldn’t get close enough to know the fate of the winery for certain.
I filled my time over the next few days helping out at a winery in Sebastopol, about an hour from the St. Helena area of Napa where the fire was. One of the harvest workers had been forced to evacuate his home and needed a couple days to get settled elsewhere. When I arrived the first morning, ash covered the ground, and little particles danced in the air. It looked almost whimsical, like snowflakes, but of course, you then remember the context. I cleaned tanks and participated in blending trials with the winemaker. We kept double checking the samples for signs of smoke taint. The grapes were all off the vine by the current fire, but they were at risk from the initial blaze.
The winemaker would collect samples, and we would then walk them from the lab to an outdoor table, where we could safely remove our masks. The table was a make-shift answer for Covid concerns; it was a piece of plywood 6 feet wide and 12 feet long covered with a plastic tablecloth. Despite our being in an area considered “safe,” outside was hazy, otherworldly. The smoke in the air felt stifling, and though logic suggested it would eventually clear to reveal sunshine, I felt claustrophobic at the thought of not knowing when.
Having not had much experience identifying smoke damage in wine, I was interested to see exactly how it would present. I am learning now that, in fact, no one has much experience with this because it has only recently become a prevalent issue. I soon realized that smoke taint doesn’t always smell like, well, smoke. It can sometimes simply muddy the nose of the wine and mask the fruit aromas. Other times, it can actually smell like an ashtray or even give a sensation of scratchy burning on the sides of the throat. We do know that these issues typically only get worse with time, which means a wine bottled with minimal detectable smoke damage could be in far worse shape when it is revisited in a few years.
One of the wines we tasted was made from a vineyard whose grapes tested in the gray area for smoke damage. Essentially, it could go either way. Typically, about 5 wineries purchase the fruit from this property. This year, the winemaker with whom I was tasting was the only one to take the grapes. Everyone else passed, as was permitted in their contracts with the vineyard owners. We were rather stunned by how the wine was showing just after it finished fermentation. It was delightful with ample fruit and no detectable smoke damage. Most of the wines that day seemed to fare extraordinarily well.
Pacific Coast Highway in a smoke-filled haze.
On Thursday, a friend and I drove toward the coast in an effort to escape the terrible air quality. The smoke had spread all through Napa and Sonoma. We took a long hike and ate sandwiches under a fern tree.
Over the next few days, I did a lot of yoga. “Focus on the current moment,” I told myself. “Surrender what is not in your control. Surrender, damn it.”
A week after the initial fire started, we got word that the winery had not, in fact, burned down.The property sustained a good bit of damage, including a newly planted estate vineyard that was completely torched, but the edifice was still standing. Inside it, all the tanks filled with fermenting juice were also still standing, but we didn’t know what state they would be in after being left unattended during such a crucial phase of the winemaking process.
“The key indicates that it ranges from 0 to 500, with 500 being the most dangerous. At this point, the area around the winery measured in the 600s.”
There is a scale used to measure air quality. The key indicates that it ranges from 0 to 500, with 500 being the most dangerous. At this point, the area around the winery measured in the 600s.
Later that week, the air had finally cleared enough to allow activity, and the mandatory evacuation order had been lifted. However, the winery was surrounded by a number of damaged trees, leaning precariously and making any work unsafe. There are not enough lumberjacks in the area to quickly remove the quantity of damaged trees from events like this, so we were experiencing a fairly long waiting period to have the work done.
It was not until the next Sunday, two weeks after the fire broke out, that my phone dinged. The next day it would be time to go back to work and to find out how our wines had survived being left to fend for themselves.