Large swathes of California continued to burn on Thursday from fires ignited by more than 10,000 lightning strikes. Firefighters are desperately overworked. Yet, even as homes and a hospital were evacuated, many wineries report clear skies and no smoke in the vineyard.
This is not true everywhere. Westside Road in Sonoma County – dotted with good wineries – was evacuated, and the city of Healdsburg is under an evacuation warning. Howell Mountain in Napa Valley was also evacuated because of the LNU Lightning Complex fire that reached 205 square miles by Thursday morning, and the top of nearby Atlas Peak was scorched.
Unfortunately, Napa and Sonoma are not alone in facing out-of-control blazes. About 60 miles southeast, in Contra Costa and surrounding counties, the SCU Lightning Complex Fire was at 215 square miles with 5 percent contained. And Santa Cruz County asked all visitors and tourists to leave the county on Thursday to free up hotel space for evacuees from its own uncontrolled fires.
San Francisco is the only one of the nine Bay Area counties without a fire on Thursday, but mayor London Breed announced the city would distribute masks to the homeless because of the smoke.
Pick while you can
The Walbridge and Meyers Fires menacing Sonoma County were not even listed by CalFire because the state's firefighting resources are stretched so thin, including leasing nearly all available private aircraft in the western United States.
"It’s pretty scary right now," Dan Goldfield, partner/winemaker of Dutton-Goldfield Winery, told Wine-Searcher. "We're picking some Pinot right now that is pretty ready, holding our hand on most of the fruit since it's not close. Thankfully, the air isn't bad right in Green Valley, but things can change at any moment. We’'re actually crushing fruit from some friends on Westside Road, where the fruit is a lot riper, the air worse, and the wineries evacuated."
After some of the problems California wine country has had with fires in the last three years, in some ways these enormous conflagrations aren't as bad. So far there are only two recorded casualties: a firefighter and an electricity worker. Wineries and people are getting more notice to evacuate than they did in 2017, when people jumped barefoot out of windows in Santa Rosa to escape as fires ripped rapidly into populated areas.
Moreover, in 2017 the smoke was so thick that the sky was brown for days in San Francisco, 60 miles away from Napa. This year, the air quality is poor but the type of smoke is different so far, locals say.
"I'm at Oxbow Market [near downtown Napa] right now and I see blue skies," John Conover, partner at Cade and Ladera wineries, told Wine Searcher. "It isn't like 2017 when there was suffocating smoke that covered the valley for days on end."
Conover closed Cade (which is co-owned by California governor Gavin Newsom) on Wednesday at noon, anticipating the possible evacuation. Most of Howell Mountain can only be reached by one road and, by 5pm, most of the mountain had been evacuated, including St Helena Hospital.
"The majority of the fires around us are in Pope Valley, and the winds are east-southeast away from us," Conover said. "The highway patrol has Deer Park Road [to Howell Mountain] blocked off. My sense is that if CalFire is going to do a big defensive move, that's one of the places they'll do it. If the fire does make it down the hill toward [Napa] valley proper, there's Meadowood and a lot of other things in the way."
Firefighters are exhausted, with the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat reporting that in Sonoma County they are working 72-hour shifts.
In California, firefighters are assisted by minimum-security prisoners who live in conservation camps and earn a small amount of money and time off their sentences. Some of those camps had been on lockdown in July because of a Covid-19 outbreak in the prison system. A California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson told Wine-Searcher on Thursday that none of those camps are now quarantined, and "at this time, incarcerated firefighters and fire crews from conservation camps across the state are actively assisting CalFire with fighting California wildfires".
Cautious optimism
Yet as dire as the fire looks on television, winemakers keep reporting that it's mostly in forested areas, and – again, unlike the past few years – not menacing too many vineyards yet.
"We are in the evacuation warning zone, and holding our breath," Joy Sterling, CEO of Iron Horse Vineyards in Sonoma County's Green Valley told Wine-Searcher. "We started picking on August 10. We have about four more days of Chardonnay for bubbly to go, and then still wines. Time will tell, as they say, but we seem to be in a special air quality zone. Amazingly, we do not smell acrid smoke in the vineyard and, while we have had some ash, it's not anything like what our friends are experiencing east of us. Part of it seems to be wind direction in our favor, and that the smoke is high up. Most importantly, in the vineyard, we are being very careful that our team is well protected and wearing the right masks. And we are studying the literature from Australia, which suggests that the main absorption point [of smoke] is the leaves, not the grape clusters, so we are being especially assiduous about keeping the leaves out of the bins."
Kathleen Inman, winemaker for Inman Family Wines in Santa Rosa, said she visited her sister and brother-in-law at their home the top of Pine Mountain on Wednesday night.
"You could see the fire around Lake Sonoma. Huge flareups," Inman told Wine-Searcher. "It's really quite shocking. And that's just one of the fires. Everything isn't on fire but, boy, there were some spectacular flames."
But the next day, she came back down to blue skies.
"I just checked all the vineyards this morning," Inman said. "None of the vineyards were smokey and everything was tasting great. I've already picked half of the Olivet Ranch Vineyard for Endless Crush rosé. This is the earliest harvest I can remember.
"The ash falling down is really good fertilizer," Inman said. "It doesn't affect any grape flavors. It's a smaller crop this year and it seems very tasty."
August 21, 2020 at 07:00AM
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Wineries Harvest while Wine Country Burns - Wine-Searcher
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