Where There’s Fire, There’s More Than Smoke Taint

Over this past week, one fire after the other has sparked in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, turning our sunny blue skies into a creepy gray and orange. Things are not normal. When the River Fire started burning this past Sunday, my first thought was our Santa Lucia Highland and Monterey AVA grapes all the way down the River Road Wine Trail. Alert after alert about residences being evacuated made this much more concerning and real – lives and homes at stake. When the Carmel Fire down east of Cachagua broke out on Tuesday, my worry turned to all my favorite Cachagua vintners – which I had just talked about in this blog. And to my friends who live in the valley. This fire goes well beyond smoke taint as residents, including our vintner friends, are evacuating and their wineries are being threatened of destruction. And then there is the Bonny Doon Fire up in Santa Cruz, with its evacuees sheltering in my little town and its smoke turning our skies so strange, with our sun at times appearing red. These fire threaten more than a single vintage – they threaten residences – including vintners and their families, entire vineyards, wineries, inventory, and years of production. Let us hope they can be contained.

I had planned to take a moment out of regular wine reviews to talk about what happens when things don’t go right.  But I wasn’t expecting them to go so devastatingly badly.  This is a retrospective of the impact of fire and smoke of what happened to wine production when the Soberanes fire hit Big Sur in 2016.  What happened in 2016 will now look like a blip compared to what I expect will be the damage from these August 2020 fires.  I only know of one winery which sustained direct fire damage from the 2016 Soberanes Fire. 

The 2016 Soberanes Fire started in July from an illegal campfire, before the grapes were fully mature, but it kept going through October, growing to a 90,000-acre fire.  The smoke from this fire was intense throughout the region, but only a single Monterey County AVA suffered the smoke damage – Carmel Valley AVA.  I became obsessed with learning more about the impact of this fire and what steps my usual wineries took as a result. 

First, I had to discover why just Carmel Valley.  After much research, I came up with 2 primary reasons.  First, the location, with Carmel Valley just north of the fire.  Second, the Monterey Bay’s 2-mile deep Submarine Canyon.  The winds off the Monterey Bay are stronger in the other AVAs, as it goes swooping down the Salinas Valley all the way down and throughout even the most southern AVAs.  Those winds just lightly creep into Carmel Valley. 

What did the Carmel Valley wineries do?  Many wineries tossed their fruit, some bottled it anyway to capture the unique flavors, some blended smoke tainted juice with juice from another AVA and changed their maturation techniques, some only offer their smokey wine if you inquire about it in the tasting room and refuse to sell it if you haven’t tasted it – know what you are buying, or they instead sourced grapes from one of the other AVAs.

I presented a class for the Northern Virginia American Wine Society last fall and I challenged them to identify what was so different between two 2016 Syrahs – same vintage, different Monterey AVAs:  one from Arroyo Seco and one from Carmel Valley.  I didn’t tell them about the fire.  There were a lot of guesses around the room, but only Chris Pearmund, the owner/vintner of Pearmund Cellars, guessed right:  smoke.

The wines aren’t ruined – they are interesting, different.  A high-quality smoke tainted wine can still be a very good wine.  And sometimes only a discerning palate will figure out it is smoke taint.  They are surprised I can detect it on the nose or palate, saying I am especially sensitive to it – but maybe it is simply because I know it is there.  Some wines might taste a little like ham hock, while others might leave a stronger aftertaste of smoke or ash.  It doesn’t dissipate over time – it will never truly go away.  And you might appreciate the wine because it represents a moment in time when things didn’t go right, yet the winery had the guts to produce it anyway. 

As an example, we were consumers of the Bernardus Marinus 2008 because it was special.  And Parsonage boldly made their 2016 wines – either sourcing fruit differently, blending it, or maturing it in neutral oak.  Sometimes when I taste their 2016 Rocco Reserve Syrah, I notice it more – as if you are at a camp fire, roasting S’Mores.  Recently, we decanted the Rocco and barely detected any smoke taint at all – just its usual deliciousness.  And smoke taint is barely detectible – sometimes not detectible at all – in their 2016 Tanner Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. 

My advice is be an educated consumer – know which vintage you are drinking and which AVA your grapes are coming from if you are looking at wines from a region affected by fire.  Read the reviews, taste before buying if you can, and figure out for yourself if you like it or not.  It is all subjective!

The tasting rooms throughout the valley were just recovering from the lack of 2016 wines to pour to guests.  They were just starting to roll out their post-fire wines when they were shut down for COVID and some later reopened on an outdoor tasting/curbside pickup basis only.  While there is never a good time for a devastating fire like this, I can’t think of a worse time.  I believe everything in Carmel Valley Village and River Road down to Arroyo Seco is shut down right now.  Give our vintners some space and let’s hope and pray not everything is destroyed. 

© Decanting Monterey 2020