Winemaker Montse Reece holds a branch from a 100-year-old Zinfandel vine at Pedroncelli Winery in Dry Creek Valley. Jessica Christian/The Chronicle
After four harrowing years of smoke and fires, Bay Area wineries rejoice in a ‘normal’ harvest
Dec 27, 2021 at 1:25pm
Bay Area winemakers will remember 2021 as the year without wildfires.
In sharp contrast to the last several years, no Wine Country estates were destroyed, no Cabernet grapes tainted by smoke, no fermentations abandoned in the wake of an emergency evacuation order. Many vintners held their breath through the last few months, knowing that the state’s deadliest fire, the 2018 Camp Fire, wasn’t extinguished until Nov. 25. Instead, the region’s autumn was smooth and easy — a brief and welcome reprieve from the serial disasters that had led this industry to fear it would never see “normal” again.
“It really was a redemption harvest,” said Montse Reece, winemaker at Pedroncelli Winery in Geyserville. “We expected the worst, we were ready, and it was fine.”
That’s not to say that the 2021 vintage didn’t bear the troubling marks of climate change. California’s extreme drought drove grape yields down — so much so that in at least one vineyard, the grapes couldn’t be harvested at all. With no signs that the drought will abate anytime soon, grape growers are preparing themselves for another year of light crops that are more likely to mature in the frazzled summer heat than in the calmer, milder fall.
That larger existential crisis still looms. But for now, industry players are taking solace where they can, and many say they’re feeling grateful for the relatively breezy year.
Some winemakers had forgotten what it was like to spend the months of August, September and October focused on making wine, rather than on dodging fires and remedying smoky grape juice. In 2019, a significant portion of Healdsburg’s Grist Vineyard grapes went unpicked due to concerns about wildfire smoke; in 2020, none of its grapes was usable.
This year, finally, it made wine: “The feeling of being able to pick everything in our vineyard was so foreign,” said Woody Hambrecht, Grist’s owner.
2021’s harvest season offered an inspiring reversal of the doomsday scenario that had begun to take hold. It turns out it’s still possible, even as climate change transforms the realities of viticulture in California, to make great wine here. Or, at least, it was still possible for one more year.
The blows to Wine Country during the last four years just kept coming.
In 2017, a series of nearby fires ignited in early October in Napa and Sonoma counties, burning 7,000 homes and killing 45 people. The Kincade Fire in 2019 enveloped the prestigious growing area of Alexander Valley in eastern Sonoma County; the smoke emanating from that blaze spread to other parts of Wine Country too, compromising the grapes. Aside from wildfires, heat spikes during peak harvest time — in 2017, Reece saw temperatures surge to 115 degrees — created chaotic conditions, pushing grapes into overripe sugar levels suddenly and threatening wine quality.
Continue reading the article from the San Fransisco Chronicle here.