There’s a Smoke Taint Task Force

Summer on the West Coast is no longer just about sun rays, sea spray and beach days. With climate change cooking landscapes everywhere, summertime today spells wildfire season. By the end of July, nearly 5,000 separate blazes across California, Oregon and Washington had already charred more than two million acres—and they’re just getting started.

Ferocious walls of flame are scary enough, but it’s actually the ensuing plumes of smoke that really freak out grape growers and winemakers from Walla Walla to Temecula. That’s because even just a day of wildfire haze can ruin your entire vintage with a condition known as smoke taint.

But help is here in the form of the West Coast Smoke Exposure Task Force. Founded five years ago as a collaboration between on-the-ground vintners and research-minded academics, the task force is studying wildfire smoke’s impact on grapevines, and then publicizing that intel as quickly as possible. Their work will help producers at all points in the winemaking process better prepare for the effects of extreme weather.

Image Courtesy of Turning Tide Wines

Evolving Findings and Guidance

The task force is already revealing more about what kind of smoke is most likely to cause problems, and is leading the federal farm insurance agency to evaluate policies that cover smoke damage. They’re also confronting long-held beliefs that smoke taint cannot happen prior to veraison, that smoke residue can be washed off of grapes and that applying barriers to the grapes like organic clay can help. The evidence on those is either contradictory or inconclusive.

As hundreds of fires rage in all three states, their latest information is being released via a FAQ next week.

Featuring more than three dozen questions and answers, the document will speak directly to growers and winemakers, covering the latest and best practices in crop insurance, risk assessment and mitigation measures. It also addresses questions about what to do in the event of a fire in the vineyard and winery, including current thoughts on how smoke gets into the berry and what things increase smoke in the wines.

Producers are desperate for this type of guidance.

“I’m in a warzone here!” said Turning Tide winemaker Alisa Jacobson over the phone last month, as helicopters and trucks zipped by on their way to fight the Lake Fire above her vineyard and winery in the Santa Ynez Valley.

“It’s always PTSD,” said Jacobson of being in the middle of a fire yet again. “It brings you back to all of those past experiences, and it’s the reason that we started to collaborate more on this in the first place.”

Before going out on her own, Jacobson spent 18 years as a winemaker for Joel Gott, where she dealt with wildfires from Mendocino, Monterey and Oregon to Napa, Sonoma and Santa Barbara. When the back-to-back fire seasons of 2017 and 2018 made it clear that smoke would be a constant concern, Jacobson invited vintners from across the West Coast as well as researchers from UC Davis, Oregon State and Washington State to start meeting regularly.

“We don’t know what’s gonna happen when the smoke starts to rear its ugly head,” she explained. “The fear of the unknown was too much for a lot of winemakers to handle.”

Such unknowns cause winemakers to cancel contracts on fruit that’s perfectly fine, while growers may sell apparently clean fruit that turns out bad. Either case can trigger costly lawsuits and stoke tensions in these tight-knit, codependent communities.

“It’s a collective problem. It’s certainly not the winemakers fault and it’s certainly not the wine growers fault,” said Patrick Rawn, who co-owns Two Mountains Winery, in Washington’s Yakima Valley, and was happy to join the task force. “This needs to be tackled by getting all these states together and deploying resources as efficiently as possible. Let’s make sure we’re not competing for research dollars and duplicating efforts.”

August 2020 Taken from HWY just south of Press looking east. Tim Carl Photography. — August 2020 Taken from HWY just south of Press looking east. – Image Courtesy of Tim Carl Photography.

Not All Smoke Is the Same

Some of the most significant strides in understanding smoke taint have been made by Washington State’s Tom Collins, who puts small greenhouses over vineyard blocks and pumps in various types of smoke to test the effects.

“What we have learned is that the quality of the smoke is as impactful as the quantity,” said Rawn. “Our valley has been socked in with smoke for two weeks before, but that smoke was really old. That will have less of an impact than having a brushfire right next to a vineyard with wind that blows it through.”

The task force is installing a network of sensors at vineyards across the West Coast to provide a better realtime sense of potential impacts.

“That’s a huge piece of it, saying that this area is risk free, this area needs to be tested and this area is probably over the limit,” said Jacobson, who said that ETS and other testing companies can be overwhelmed by too many submissions. “Then at least we can categorize and not turn in a million samples and then just hope for answers.”

Fostering a constant feedback loop between vintners and researchers is critical to the task force’s speedy results. “It’s important to have real stakeholders involved in what the projects are, so they’re not in some little research bubble thinking they’re going on the right path when it’s not something that the industry wants or needs,” said Jacobson. She’s also proud of working with the insurance industry, which will start test programs for covering smoke damage for next year’s vintage.

Valley floor cab vineyard 2020 Glass Fire. – Image Courtesy of Tim Carl Photography

What’s Next for Managing Smoke Taint

Questions still loom much larger than the answers. Smoke taint is often undetected until the grapes are picked and processed, as the offending compounds aren’t unlocked until fermentation. Updated guidelines for micro-fermentations, which can be carried out quickly in buckets or mason jars, should give winemakers more accurate ideas of which grapes are affected.

“After the wine shows smoke impact at the winery, there’s not a whole lot you can do,” said Jacobson, although task force researchers are tackling those potential solutions as well. She’ll take all the help the wine industry can get, especially since she already filed her first insurance claim of the season as the Lake Fire burned.

“Unfortunately this problem is not going away,” said Rawn. “We just have to learn to manage and mitigate the risk. Growers have to be good partners to the winemakers, and winemakers have to be good partners to the growers. We’re all in this together.”