Napa Valley is burning

[tim]

Napa is on fire, and it is spreading into Sonoma. This is really bad. Imagine if it were happening in Bordeaux.

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/m ... ident-map/

[marcs]

It looks like all of Spring Mountain and the entire St. Helena area is on fire...what a disaster.

[jckba]

This is catastrophic and my thoughts and prayers go out to all of those affected and hope they get this under control soon.

[Musigny 151]

I have just been reading the timeline on the Berserker board. Horrifying

[Nicklasss]

Keep yourselve safe Nalan and Michael. Hope your house in the area is safe.

Not funny at all but i'm happy to read that some BWEers have compassion for that area producing excellent wines.

Nic

[RPCV]

Newton are Burgess are gone. Meadowood (owner of Harlan Estate) is burning. This is horrifying. I am in the central valley for work and have never seen such poor air quality. Winds have shifted and Calistoga is under imminent threat. Please spare Montelena......

[Gerry M.]

Oh no, this horrible. Forget the wine, thinking of the lives effected.

[Michael-P]

The Amorosa castle is apparently gone too. I like Disneyland so I liked the castle too, although not any of the wines. Still a fun visit.
Others have burnt to the ground too. Sad.
Fires slowly getting under control.

Nicholas: Thanks, our house is at the Eastern edge of the town of Napa, so we have been protected by the fireman. Let's hope that continues for future fires!

Michael-P

[RPCV]

Looks like the fire is semi-under control. Here is a link that summarizes the devastation:

https://sf.eater.com/2020/10/7/21506015 ... ts-resorts

[JimHow]

Thanks for the report, RP, this just can't keep happening. Governments need a global Manhattan Project.
I remember when Maureen's family's estate came within like inches of destruction a few years ago.
Sounds like the vineyards themselves are in decent shape?

[RPCV]

Yes. Most of the vines survived the fires but the outlook is dim for making wines from the grapes. The issue is that smoke resin has been deposited on grape skins which is then released into the juice during maceration and as fermentation converts sugars into alcohol. Another link below form WS on the issues wine makers are facing:

https://www.winespectator.com/articles/ ... ir-harvest

[AKR]

(NYT) Dining: Fires Take a Deep Toll on Wine Country
Dining: Fires Take a Deep Toll on Wine Country
2020-10-07 07:01:05.236 GMT


By Eric Asimov
Oct. 7 (New York Times) -- Beyond the financial cost of the destruction
in Napa Valley is the emotional price, as wine that's been nurtured from
vineyard to barrel flows down the drain.
The 2020 vintage was already difficult in Napa Valley. It was born in a
drought, matured through terrible heat spikes and had endured smoky conditions
from the haze of numerous Northern California fires.
Then, on the last weekend of September -- in the middle of harvest --
savage wildfires seemed to attack the northern end of the valley from all
directions.
The Glass Fire started in the early morning of Sept. 27 in Deer Park,
east of St. Helena, near the Silverado Trail, the north-south artery of the
eastern valley. It swept east, destroying the winery and barrel warehouse at
Burgess Cellars and leveling the turreted stone building at Chateau Boswell.
It engulfed the three-Michelin-star restaurant at the Meadowood luxury resort
and licked the edges of vineyards at Viader and Failla.
It had begun climbing the hills on the east side of the valley when the
wind shifted, blowing the fire back west.
In the Spring Mountain District on the west side of the valley, windblown
embers from the Glass Fire ignited another blaze, while a fire in Sonoma
County to the west swept in over the hills, consuming the winery at Cain
Vineyard and Winery, along with three houses and all the wine in the 2019 and
2020 vintages.
Newton was gravely damaged, losing its signature pagoda building, which
had just been completely rebuilt, its terraced estate vineyard and a lot of
wine. A large warehouse and winery area at Castello di Amorosa were destroyed,
and at least 10,000 cases of wine were ruined.
Numerous other wineries, including Hourglass, Merus, Behrens Family,
Fairwinds Estate, Paloma Vineyard, Tuck Beckstoffer Estate, Spring Mountain
Vineyard and Sterling Vineyards were all assessing the damage in a volatile
situation. Late last week, the situation seemed dire, with bleak forecasts for
hot, dry and windy weather.
But after several days of touch and go, on Monday morning, the fires
seemed less immediately threatening as the winds shifted, said Frank Dotzler,
the general manager at Outpost Wines, on Howell Mountain.
"From south St. Helena to north of Calistoga, the hillside is completely
charred," said Mr. Dotzler, speaking of the eastern side of Napa Valley. "A
drive through the valley now, it's just unimaginable."
Despite the devastation to structures and property, nobody appears to
have been hurt. Beyond Newton, the damage to vineyards, the most important
part of the wine industry, appears to have been minimal, limited mainly to
scorching around the edges.
Grape vines are often able to withstand fire damage during growing
season. Moist and green, they act as firebreaks. But dried cover crops like
legumes, planted between the rows, can catch fire, as can infrastructure like
rubber irrigation hoses and drainage equipment, which seems to have been the
case at Newton.
The damage to wineries cannot be tallied simply by adding up the cost to
rebuild. It goes much deeper than that.
For many consumers, a bottle of wine is just a product on a shelf,
acquired in a transaction, consumed and forgotten. For the producers of good
wine, however, a bottle is deeply imbued with emotional as well as economic
meaning.
The wine itself is the product of vineyards, living entities that have
been nurtured from cuttings, sustained and protected through natural threats
and maladies until, finally, the grapes are harvested. The French word for
fermenting and aging the wine is élevage, which means raising or rearing, as
you would a child.
What's bottled is not just a beverage, but a legacy of the people who
grew the grapes and made the wine, a snapshot of their thoughts, their
emotions and their labor as they seek to convey the character and personality
of a place through the wine.
To lose a vintage, much less a vineyard, is devastating.
"It was such an uphill battle, but we made it," said Jean-Baptiste
Rivail, Newton's general manager, speaking of the arduous 2020 vintage.
While the entire crop had not been picked, much of the wine had been
fermented and put into vats and barrels at Newton's newly constructed
winemaking facility.
"Everything is gone," Mr. Rivail said. "It's all gone."
When Mr. Rivail and his team, who had been evacuated, were finally able
to return to Newton to inspect the site, they were greeted by streams of wine
flowing downhill.
"Every drop of wine was like a miracle this year, the viticulture was so
hard," he said. "It's almost like losing a living thing. And it's violent, to
go back on site to find ashes and gutters full of wine."
Christopher Howell, the general manager and wine grower at Cain, not only
lost the winery and the '19 and '20 vintages, but he and his wife, Katie
Lazar, also lost their house. He took a philosophical view of the fires.
"It's not a good part of nature, but it is part of nature," he said.
"Nobody said nature is benign."
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, Mr. Howell was already looking
ahead. Two vintages may have been lost, but three others, from 2016, '17 and
'18, were safely in storage in a facility in the southern part of the valley.
"It's painful, but we didn't lose anybody, and we have many of the things
we need to keep going," he said. "The people of Cain are at the top of the
list. We're gathering to talk and to think through the next steps. We have to
get in there and care for the vines, and we have wines to sell.
"There's more to Cain than simply a building."
As September turned to October, there was no end to the threat. On Spring
and Diamond Mountains on the west side of Napa Valley, and on Howell Mountain
and Pritchard Hill on the east, winemakers who had not been evacuated were
holed up with generators, agricultural water sprayers, earth-moving equipment
and whatever other tools they could muster in an effort to defend their
properties.
The brothers Stuart and Charles Smith founded Smith-Madrone on Spring
Mountain in 1971, and, Stuart Smith said, have for decades feared devastating
fires like these.
Over the course of the week, the brothers, along with Stuart's sons, Sam
and Tom, hunkered down at the property. In vulnerable places around the
property, they staged buckets and bins full of water ready to douse fires.
They hosed down structures and moved equipment into the vineyard, where it had
the best chance of protection.
"We basically just prepared for a fight," Stuart Smith said.
The fire approached the property several times from different directions,
but working with their neighbors and firefighters they were able to confine it
to the edges of the property, losing no more than a few water lines and some
water filtering equipment.
"There are burn marks on our redwood trees up 40 or 50 feet," Mr. Smith
said, "but it didn't damage them."
In some cases the professionals took over. Mr. Dotzler of Outpost said
the situation there had deteriorated Wednesday night as fires intensified. He
had been evacuated on Sept. 27, but was able to visit the property several
times.
"There are fire engines up there ready to defend it," he said. "It's in
the hands of the firefighters."
As the fire approached, the firefighters bulldozed through fields and
woods, trying to divert the blaze by depriving it of its fuel.
"It was coming west to east, and then it went around the corner and tried
to get us from the north," Mr. Dotzler said. It got within 100 meters of
Outpost, he said, before winds shifted and the fire receded.
"I attribute this to the firefighters doing a great job," he said.
Mr. Dotzler is also an owner, with the winemaker Thomas Rivers Brown, of
Mending Wall Winery, on the Silverado Trail in St. Helena. When the Glass Fire
started, Mending Wall was right in its path. It burned right up to the parking
lot on the first night before diverting, Mr. Dotzler said.
Even before the latest round of fires, the pervasive smoke that hung over
wine country in September had taken its toll. For the first time since 1978,
Chateau Montelena, a historic producer near Calistoga, will not make an estate
cabernet sauvignon because the grapes were tainted by ash and smoke.
At Kamen Estate, across the Mayacamas Mountains in neighboring Sonoma
County, the proprietor, Robert Mark Kamen, has concluded he will most likely
not make any red wines in 2020 because of smoke taint, which can make a wine
taste disagreeably smoky, or worse, like ashes.
"To say I'm bummed is an understatement," he said. He has already sold
off some wine that might eventually have fetched $100 a bottle for $5 a
gallon, to huge producers who will use it as a minuscule, undetectable part in
the vast tanks of wine they will bottle and sell cheap.
For Mr. Kamen -- a screenwriter with movies like the "Taken" series, the
"Transporter" series and "The Karate Kid" on his résumé -- the last month or
so, with the intense heat and the smoke, has been surreal. Almost all the
grapes were picked by Oct. 1, when, in an ordinary year, the harvest would has
just begun.
"Every day has looked like a Chinese watercolor, muted and gray," he
said. "The heat combined with the particulate matter in the air made it
hotter, and the grapes started freaking out."
Despite the destruction at Newton, not all was lost. While its Spring
Mountain vineyard was destroyed, it also has vineyards in the Carneros region
and on Mount Veeder, both to the south.
"So we will make wine in 2021," Mr. Rivail said. Newton is owned by LVMH,
the luxury conglomerate, so it's not without resources. "We will rebuild,
we'll keep making wine. We're lucky that everybody was safe."
Most meaningful of all, Mr. Rivail said, has been the reaction of the
community. He has already received invitations from other wineries to use
their facilities until Newton is back on its feet.
"It's great for the team to feel at least we have these options," he
said. "I understand the meaning of being forever grateful."

[Claret]

During the past 6 days there have been two fires within 3 miles of my house. Packed for evac again. First 10,000 acres and 150 acres on Friday night. Thankfully they have been controlled before getting to any houses.

Reno has 1 or more arsonists setting fires in apartment complex's and in a large apartment construction area that was torched at night. About half an hour south of my house. Two people have been killed, I think they got that guy but others are still burning.

It has not rained for 2 months and that thunderstorm sparked 4 fires. I sure hope another lunatic is not up here in the North Valleys.

[Claudius2]

Guys
Very sorry to hear.
Australia was also devastated last year with the worst fires in recorded history, and that followed similar hellish fires a decade or so earlier.
Wineries in the Yarra, Gippsland and central Victoria were often completely ruined.
In a few cases, the vineyards were re-planted and the wineries rebuilt, only to have them burnt to the ground once again.