Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, talking and writing about smoke taint. I’ve interviewed scientists and winemakers, pored over research papers, studied spreadsheets with numbers I didn’t fully understand. All of that has been an attempt to gain some understanding of wildfire smoke’s mysterious and pernicious effects on wine grapes — which stands to become even more dire in coming years if megafires continue to ravage the California and threaten its $40 billion wine industry.
But despite all the mental energy I’ve spent on smoke taint, I hadn’t actually tasted very many examples of it. That’s not an accident. Many winemakers (understandably) tend to be cagey about smoke taint in their wines, especially with journalists. Just as they don’t want to release smoky wines to their customers, they also probably don’t want writers to get an unfavorable impression of the vintage.
So I was excited when Ed Kurtzman, who makes wine for six small brands including August West, Mansfield-Dunne and Sandler, invited me to his winery in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood to taste a sampling of his 2020 wines, including several smoky specimens. He promised to be candid about the wines’ problems. No PR spins.
“I’m learning like you are,” Kurtzman said when we sat down (wearing masks, 10 feet apart) at the warehouse winery. Although he’s been making wine in California for decades, he hadn’t really encountered serious smoke problems prior to 2020, with the exception of 2008, when a few vineyards he worked with in Anderson Valley and western Sonoma County had heavy smoke exposure. But those concerns were isolated to a relatively narrow geographic area; this year, because wildfires burned in so many different corners of California, Kurtzman had to contend with issues in vineyards from Mendocino to Monterey.
Unlike some other winemakers, who simply chose not to make wines that were at risk of smoke taint, Kurtzman decided to forge ahead, make the wines and see how they turned out.
The first two wines he poured, both Chardonnays from the Central Coast, tasted normal (one, from the Fiddlestix Vineyard in Santa Barbara County, was especially tasty). Those were the controls; the smoke-taint tests had come back negative, Kurtzman said. I was beginning to wonder if my palate would even be able to recognize smoke taint when I encountered it — until I put a third Chardonnay, this one from Monterey’s Santa Lucia Highlands, to my lips. It tasted like Laphroaig: menthol, peat, aggressive flavors of smoke. Yep, I got it now. That was smoke taint.
What struck me most as we tasted through the rest was how differently the smoky flavors manifested in each wine. A Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir reminded me not of Scotch but of mezcal — it was more of a sweet, fresh, herbal smokiness. There was only one wine in the lineup, a Syrah, that showed the explicitly ashy flavors — campfire, cigarette — that I’d been looking for when we started.
There’s an explanation for the stark differences, Kurtzman said. Various smoke compounds contribute specific flavors and aromas; a wine with higher levels of guaiacol — the most well-known of the smoke compounds that lodge inside grapes — might be expected to taste one way, while higher concentrations of another, like syringol, might have its own signature. The research is still a ways away from mapping any sort of reliably linear relationship between these compounds and their flavors in wine, however.
Beyond their individual flavor matrices, each of the smoke-impacted wines we tasted seemed to have one thing in common: a very abrupt, clipped finish. It was as if the wine just suddenly ended where you would have expected it to linger in a subtle, pleasant decrescendo.
In some cases, I felt that I could still taste the wine underneath the smoky flavors — I could still make out a black-pepper aroma in the Syrah, and bright red cherry note in a mildly smoke-tainted Pinot Noir. Since these wines are all still so young (some of them hadn’t even finished fermenting when I tasted them), Kurtzman is hopeful that some could evolve in a pleasant direction. “I hope some more fruit comes out so that the smoke is more in the background,” he said.
Kurtzman will wait several more months before deciding what to do with his individual wines — whether to sell the smoky lots on the bulk market or, if he decides they’re passable, bottle them. If he does release them, he’ll be honest with customers. “We’d want to tell them the story of the vintage,” he said.
But above all, he hopes to learn something from the experience of 2020. By now, it’s clear: As long as there are wildfires in California, smoke taint will be a problem that winemakers here have to contend with. Maybe not ever again to the full extent of 2020, when the fires came so early in the season, threatening an unprecedented volume of unpicked fruit. Maybe not in every part of the state, maybe not every year. But no one can afford not to be thinking about it.
“You hope this will be a once-in-a-winemaker’s-lifetime kind of experience,” Kurtzman said, “but who knows.”
Wine of the Week
The latest Wine of the Week is a Carignan-Mourvedre blend from the Evangelho Vineyard in Contra Costa County, which longtime readers may remember from a big piece I did in 2016. (It’s really an extraordinarily cool vineyard.) This wine comes from Desire Lines Wine Co., the label from Bedrock assistant winemaker Cody Rasmussen and his wife Emily. It’s delicious.
And since we skipped last week’s newsletter (I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving, by the way!), I’ll also direct you to that week’s wine: the Olema Cabernet Sauvignon, which at $25 is an outstanding value for a rich, modern Sonoma County Cab.
What I’m reading
• Napa Valley’s most famous fancy restaurant, the French Laundry, is becoming famous for more than just its salmon cornets. The night after Governor Gavin Newsom defied his own coronavirus safety guidelines by attending a party at the Yountville restaurant, San Francisco Mayor London Breed attended her own friend’s birthday celebration there, The Chronicle’s Heather Knight learned.
• Those two politicians have drawn criticism for ignoring the advice against social gatherings that they’ve been preaching themselves — including, most hilariously, from my colleague Soleil Ho, who wrote a very funny piece of satire about the situation.
• File this under “duh”: Wood chips and mulches used in residential landscaping are making wildfires worse. Bryan Mena talked to experts, including Napa volunteer firefighter (and former Burgess Cellars owner) Steve Burgess, about this frustrating phenomenon.
• In a twist, one of California’s most eccentric winemakers has inspired Italians to revive a style of wine from their own past. Wine Spectator’s Robert Camuto profiled the resurgence of Ruchè, a fragrant red grape variety that’s fallen by the wayside in Piedmont — but which may now have a future thanks to the encouragement of Randall Grahm.
Drinking with Esther is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle’s wine critic. Follow along on Twitter: @Esther_Mobley and Instagram: @esthermob
December 03, 2020 at 07:00PM
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I drank smoke-tainted California wines. Here's what they actually taste like - San Francisco Chronicle
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