Back in mid-September this year, Bobby Moy invited me and a few friends to help him pick an acre of cabernet sauvignon in Calistoga, the northernmost reach of Napa Valley. For Moy, a former sommelier who started Chiron Wines in 2015, it was a handshake deal. He was offered the fruit for free, in exchange for a finished case of wine. The vineyard was in limbo, due to the smoke in the air that season and the possibility of smoke taint in the grapes.
Moy ran the numbers on the costs of bringing in the grapes and renting space in a custom-crush facility to produce the wine. If the fruit turned out to be tainted with smoke, he might be able to sell it for a few cents on the dollar in the bulk wine market. If the fruit was good, and Moy believed it was, he estimated he could have up to two tons of quality cabernet sauvignon grapes—fruit that would normally sell for $9,000 a ton. Without making the wine and waiting a month for a test, there was no way to know if the grapes were healthy or not. Moy decided to take the risk.
It was a relatively easy pick: The vines were trained to a high trellis, so there wasn’t a lot of bending over, and the temperature hovered at a breezy 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Moy trained the team, showing us how he selected and cradled clusters with his non-beer-holding hand. Then we set about eyeing, clipping and dropping our chosen bunches into small yellow bins, transferring them to the half-ton bins on the trailer behind his truck. Later, we hauled them to the winery to be destemmed and transferred to maceration vats to soak for a few days before fermentation. We stood around the bins in the cool dimness of the winery, reaching in to sample some of the grapes we’d harvested. We hadn’t selected the two tons Moy anticipated, but just under three-quarters of a ton at weigh in. Beautiful fruit, we all agreed.
The future of that wine was, and still is, unknown. “We just can’t tell,” Moy explained. “Smoke taint is sneaky; it hides in the sugars.”
Less than one week later, the Glass Fire erupted north of St. Helena, on the eastern slope of Napa Valley. Moy and half of his picking crew were among the 70,000 people subject to mandatory evacuation during the worst wildfire in Napa Valley’s recorded history. It was a week before Moy and his family were able to return home and check in on the wine.
Of the last four harvests in Napa Valley, only 2018 has been free from a major fire threat. While it’s too early to know the outcome of the 2020 harvest for those who were able to make wine, this season brings the release of the lion’s share of Napa Valley cabernets from 2017, the first of the recent “fire vintages.” We’ve found some beautiful ’17s in our tastings for this issue, and they made us curious to talk with the farmers and winemakers who made them.
Reporting during the recent 2020 fires, I spoke with growers about what made their 2017 vintage a success, and what we might expect from their 2020s. As it turns out, their farming decisions have been driven as much by the heat as by the fires.
Just southeast of Calistoga, Foothill Boulevard becomes St. Helena Highway, taking you through the busy main street, then south of town, where Cathy Corison farms cabernet sauvignon at the Kronos Vineyard in St. Helena. Planted on an alluvial fan of Bale gravelly loam on phylloxera-resistant St. George rootstock in 1971, the nearly 50-year-old vines produce some of the most elegant and nuanced cabernet in the Napa Valley. Corison’s 2017 Kronos and her 2017 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon are both highlighted in this issue, and she is excited about the wines. “I, too, love the 2017s,” she says. “The season was very challenging—with prolonged, excessive heat as harvest started in early September. I pick early on early sites, so I was already scheduling picks when the heat hit over Labor Day. When I saw the forecast, I sat down and scheduled nine straight days of picking. It turned into a scramble in the heat, but we got the grapes off the vine in great shape.”
In fact, for producers looking to harvest at lower potential alcohols, early heat spikes may have saved the vintage from the fires.
“In warmer seasons, sugar accumulates faster and can outrun the other components, forcing our picking hand,” Corison explains. “Our grapes had been in for nearly three weeks when the fire started on October eighth,” she recalls. “I so value the red-cherry and blueberry end of the cabernet-sauvignon flavor spectrum, along with the purple plum and cassis and blackberry. Picking early, at lower sugars, is the only way to get all those flavors in the same glass at the same time. It also keeps the natural acidity snappy.
The fires of 2020 began on August 17 in the eastern hills of Napa Valley. At her vineyards in St. Helena, Corison says the type of smoke and the wind patterns came into play. “Both 2017 and 2020 experienced significant heat during the ripening season, though the timing was different, and of course fires played a role in both, again with differences in timing. It is simply too early to tell whether smoke is a problem this year. It is in our favor that our grapes were only exposed to ‘old’ smoke, from relatively distant fires.” During the early fire in August of 2020, she says the benchland in St. Helena was thick with smoke that didn’t have much of a scent, presumably because there was a low concentration of volatile phenols, which are considered a culprit in smoke taint.
“So far so good, as everything ticks down to dryness,” Corison says of her fermenting juice from 2020. “A lesson learned from 2017 is to not jump to conclusions.”
Down valley, in the Oak Knoll District, Steve Matthiasson also makes a distinction between “old” and “new” smoke. In 2017, he was farming the Red Hen Vineyard, at the base of Mount Veeder, owned at the time by the Araujo family. Matthiasson was making merlot from one block while Diana Snowden Seysses of Ashes & Diamonds was purchasing fruit for a single-vineyard cabernet sauvignon.
While most of the news is about fire, Matthiasson speaks of it more as a symptom of the drought and the heat. He believes the rains that ended the extended drought in the early spring of 2017 dictated the future of the fruit—a red-fruit character he finds in his 2017s. Later, when the heat wave hit toward the end of the growing season, the vines shut down, halting sugar production.
Diana Snowden Seysses witnessed that shutdown as well, and recalls that the bunch stems had withered, preventing the vines from delivering sugars to the grapes. She saw it as an opportunity—to take advantage of the lower sugars, and by extension, lower potential alcohols.
“California treats heat events
like the French treat rain.”
— STEVE MATTHIASSON, MATTHIASSON WINES
“California treats heat events like the French treat rain,” Matthiasson says. In both cases, those weather events drive harvest decisions and, for some, the heat in 2017 may have helped save the vintage. I ask Matthiasson how hot it needs to be for the grapes to stop sugar production. His reply: “Really frickin’ hot.”
Matthiasson says that 2020, by contrast, had completely different spring conditions—it was one of the driest springs in 50 years. The fruit was concentrated and was on track for early ripening. When lightning strikes ignited the fires of the LNU complex (multiple blazes in Cal Fire’s Sonoma Lake Napa Unit), the winds were blowing to the east, leaving the entire Napa Valley floor safe from the “fresh” smoke of the fires.
“What we got,” Matthiasson says, “was a high haze, filtering out the sunlight and preventing sugars from coming up.” Once again, his grapes came in with lower sugars than usual; he says it was some of the best fruit he’d seen in a long time. He was worried about wind changes, and kept an eye to the north, the source of what are typically the more dangerous winds at harvest, potentially spreading fire and blowing smoke down valley. He and Snowden Seysses called the pick, and their grapes were pressed off by the time the Glass Fire started on September 27, east of St. Helena in Deer Park; the fire would not be contained fully until October 20.
The impacts of “old” and “new” smoke are still under investigation, borne out by observation, says Matthiasson. It’s a matter of particulates versus vapors, he says: particulates are the “stuff”—the tiny bits of ash in the air. Vapors have the phenols, the flavors. “‘Old smoke’ has the ‘stuff,’” he explains. “‘New smoke’ has the flavors. Particulates are one thing, phenols are another.”
When it comes to the impact of smoke on the grapes, “Age and proximity are a big deal,” Matthiasson says. “The volatile phenols have a short half-life of maybe twenty-four hours or so before UV light and oxygen cause them to degrade.” Like Corison, he is less concerned about airborne particulates than about volatile phenols.
The danger with volatile phenols, Matthiasson says, is that they can bind to grape sugars, forming glycosides, where they can’t be perceived. As the glycosides break down in fermentation, or later, as the wine ages, the phenols are released, tainting the wine. In 2020, Matthiasson conducted a micro-fermentation and had the wine tested for free glycols. “Over five parts per million are a problem,” he says. “Ours came in at one-point-two.”
Both Matthiasson and Snowden Seysses reject the idea of treating their wines to remove smoke taint, choosing not to bottle anything they believe might be impacted. “I won’t put the wines through a spinning cone or reverse osmosis,” says Snowden Seysses. “If there turns out to be a problem, I’ll just bulk them out.”
Farther south, down the valley and into Coombsville, Sean McBride of Crosby Roamann had harvested his 2017 cabernet off the Harmony School Vineyard. It’s a one-acre block of clay loam on a slight incline, usually the basis for his Crosby Reserve Cabernet. He had intended to blend it with fruit from Calistoga and Oak Knoll, which, by that point, was already quite ripe.
“We picked the merlot so early—on September second—because a heat spike forced our hand,” McBride recalls, citing temperatures that rose above 110 degrees from August 30 through September 3. “We were lucky enough to pick it before the worst of the heat hit the vineyard. Then, a somewhat cooler trend came in, and we let the cabernet hang through the end of September, at which point it became clear that we needed to pick everything quickly.” The up-valley fruit had reached optimal ripeness, but, after tasting the lots from barrels, he chose to focus on Coombsville for the Reserve.
As for the 2020 vintage, still fermenting when we spoke, he remains optimistic. “We are performing short, vigorous fermentations with lots of splashing and oxygen to round out the wines.” And though he doesn’t taste any smoke in the wines yet, he’s running trials to see how they might turn out if smoke taint is present.
Looking forward, McBride is investing in the cooler southern reaches of Napa Valley. “Extended heat in Napa Valley is going to be a reality for the future. With that in mind, we have recently purchased a vineyard in Los Carneros. We are replanting four acres of sauvignon blanc to a mix of red Bordeaux varieties that I feel will do well in the years to come in that part of Napa.”
There are some relatively cool pockets up valley, where vines might get some relief from the full force of the heat in Calistoga and St. Helena. One of those pockets is along Diamond Creek, which follows a cut in the Mayacamas Mountains where cooler air pours in from the west. Three vineyards on either side of Diamond Creek—Volcanic Hill, Gravelly Meadow and Red Rock Terrace—have been producing elegant cabernets since the early 1970s. The season here is typically late and, even so, these three vineyards, harvested after the 2017 fires, received some of our highest praise among the Year’s Best Cabernets.
Phil Steinschriber, who has made the wines at Diamond Creek since 1991, describes the estate as forming a bowl, which he believes provides some natural protection from wind-driven smoke at the higher elevations of the Mayacamas mountains. In 2017, there was, in fact, some smoke from the Tubbs fire that raced from Calistoga to Santa Rosa the night of October 8, affecting land as close as three miles to the north. After the fires, he pulled some leaves off the vines, “to lessen the effects of smoke,” he says, “as ash may fall on the leaves and adhere to them.” Steinschriber had been prepared to start harvest the day the fires broke out, and was delayed by a week. He harvested the 2017s from October 17 through November 2 (normally harvest lasts a month and is complete by the end of October).
As they brought in the fruit, he and his team washed the grapes to remove any possible ash, soaking them in water, then draining them in what amounted to a large colander they had built. Normally, Steinschriber cold-soaks the fruit for four or five days; in 2017, he limited the cold soak to one day before starting fermentation, waited to press until the wine reached dryness, then let the juice settle for a day before racking it into barrel. When our panels tasted these wines in September 2020, they were richer and riper than some of the early harvested wines, but no less elegant.
The circumstances were different in 2020, according to Graham Wehmeier, who came on as Diamond Creek’s winemaker this year as Steinschriber transitions toward retirement. Wehmeier got a dispensation from the fire department to stay on the grounds at Diamond Creek when the site, like much of the Napa Valley, was under forced evacuation during parts of October.
“Unlike 2017,” Wehmeier says, “this year there were many vineyards in Napa Valley that received a heavy dose of smoke back in August, with the LNU fires, and never really had a chance. Luckily for us, this didn’t seem to apply to the Calistoga or Diamond Mountain area, as we got plenty of haze but never the ‘fresh’ smoke.
“I think it’s important to remember that, contrary to popular belief, there were great wines made after the valley was engulfed in smoke in 2017,” Wehmeier says. “One of the main lessons for me from 2017 is that smoke taint can be remarkably site (and variety) specific; wine from one block can show the smoke flavors while wine from another right next to it does not, so it doesn’t make sense to write off a whole vintage on that basis.”
This story appears in the print issue
of December 2020.
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