For winemaker Ian Brand, it’s important to weigh the good alongside the devastating when it comes to the intense weather of the past year. A summer lightning storm followed by dry, hot winds drove the worst wildfire season in California’s recorded history, an unprecedented threat to the region that produces the vast majority of the country’s wine grapes.
The extreme weather that led to the scorching of vineyards in some counties and the tainting of some grapes with smoke, Brand says, also generated some positive surprises, at least for his company, I. Brand & Family Wines.
“As an industry, we are going to have to deal with the changing climate more than we’d like,” he says. “Monterey County is shifting as a growing region. Usually, we are too cold for [Cabernet Sauvignon] but not this year. We have actually had the best Cab that we have ever had.”
Kim Stemler, executive director of the Monterey County Vintners and Growers Association, describes Brand’s Cab as a unique accomplishment: “It is much more fruit-forward and doesn’t have the tannin of a typical Cab,” she says.
It’s impossible to say whether conditions would ever allow Cabernet’s footprint in Monterey County to expand substantially beyond the 11 percent of total grape tonnage reported in 2019. For now, two other varietals, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, stand firmly as the king crops of the local industry. They contribute a combined 60 percent or so of the tonnage and value of Monterey County’s $186 million wine grape industry.
The smoke from California’s historic fire season and its three local manifestations – the River, Carmel and Dolan fires – has led to a substantial loss of grape crop in Monterey County.
“There are areas that had significant losses,” Brand says. “It’s vineyard by vineyard by vineyard and block by block – a tremendous economic impact to our growers.”
It’s a treacherous challenge: smoke compounds can permeate the skin of the grapes and bind with the sugars inside, but a grower can’t detect any change by taste, scent or appearance until after fermentation, when smokiness emerges to taint the wine’s flavor.
On the bright side: “Monterey County is a third Chardonnay and Chardonnay doesn’t seem to get smoke taint [as easily],” Brand says. That resilience is helped by the fact that with white varietals, the skins are removed before the grapes are processed into wine.
But even with the other varietals grown in Monterey County, it’s still unclear whether smoke did, in fact, spoil the grapes.
“Testing is ultimately the way to know. That’s the nefarious aspect of it,“ Brand says.
The threat is especially nefarious because testing capacity was minuscule. Across the United States, there was only one commercial laboratory set up to examine grapes for smoke taint, ETS Laboratories. Demand was so high that wait times reached 40 days in some cases, according to Stemler, who says that growers resorted to sending their grapes all the way to a lab in Australia. They had no choice. Without certified testing, they wouldn’t be able to count on a payout from crop insurance. Some perfectly good grapes sat for weeks and went to waste instead of being transformed into wine due to the lack of testing.
“The issue,” Stemler says, is “mostly about our systems being prepared to test for smoke influence throughout the state. We have lost more grapes to system stuff.”
The saving grace during the crisis has been the collaborative relationship among vintners. They shared information about vineyards and alerted each other when they received test results. “We have been very happy with our communities here,” Brand says. “We are figuring out how to navigate this crisis together.”
Brand’s emphasis on the positive extends to the other crisis that existed before the wildfires came along, a pandemic that froze commercial activity and forced the closure of wine tasting rooms.
“We had tremendous support from the local community,” he says, “People are driving by and picking up wine. I have been surprised to see fairly similar amounts going out the front door as before.”
Clarification: In Ian Brand's quote, “Monterey County is a third Chardonnay and Chardonnay doesn’t seem to get smoke taint [as easily]," the part in the brackets was added later to clarify that Chardonnay is less susceptible to smoke taint but not immune to it.