POUR ONE OUT

The quest to save wine from wildfire smoke.

- BY NICOLA TWILLEY

The entire West Coast wine industry now fears a bitter, ashy-tasting product.

According to Mike Zolnikov, who tends a couple of acres of Pinot Noir and an acre of Chardonnay on a flat, slightly soggy patch of the central Willamette Valley, in Oregon, it had been a once-in-a-decade growing season. “Not too hot, not too wet,” he recalled, wistfully. “It would have been a really great year.” A few hundred miles south, in California’s Napa Valley, the winemaker Ashley Egelhoff, of Honig Vineyard and Winery, was feeling similarly about her Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc. “That’s how 2020 was panning out: like Goldilocks, just right,” she told me.

For wine growers and makers, each season offers a series of fresh yet familiar opportunities for disaster.

Drought shrivels the grapes; excessive heat deprives the juice of acidity; too much rain results in rampant mold. "But that's the fun of it," Egelhoff said. "Every harvest brings a surprise." The gamble of spraying early or of picking the grapes late, the black magic of fermentation, the art of blending: it's precisely the puzzle of chance and choice that keeps winemakers hooked. Plus, every now and then, as in 2020, you get perfect conditions. "Then everything went to hell," Egelhoff said.

That August, the West Coast's worst fire season in history began. More than eleven thousand bolts of lightning struck central and Northern California in the span of thirty-six hours, heralding the start of an orange-skied autumn in which flights were suspended, more than eight million acres burned across twelve states, and winemakers' dreams of a perfect vintage went up in flames. "The lightning storm came over on the first day we were bringing Sauvignon Blanc in, and within couple of hours there was smoke," Egelhoff told me. "I was on the crush pad we were unloading our first truck of fruit and it was probably one of the most heartbreaking moments of my career."