\n<\/p>\n
E<\/span>lton Slone and his colleagues at the Robert Craig Winery in Napa valley had gathered for their annual pre-harvest company party last week \u2013 complete with copper pot carnitas and grape tacos \u2013 when one of his co-workers noticed an alert on her phone. The Pickett fire, a blaze that had started about 10 miles (16km) away near the town of Calistoga, was moving toward their vineyards on Howell Mountain.<\/p>\n Knowing that the Glass fire \u2013 a 2020 blaze that damaged numerous wineries and spoiled a year\u2019s harvest \u2013 had burned along the same path, Slone hoped no fuel remained for this new fire. \u201cBut that was not the case,\u201d he said. Within the week, the winery\u2019s Candlestick Vineyard would become \u201ca sacrificial lamb for the town of Angwin\u201d when firefighters lit a controlled burn on their property to control the larger fire.<\/p>\n Vineyards can make excellent fire breaks because they are typically clear of burnable plant matter, and grape vines themselves are moist enough to be nonflammable. But heat damage and smoke can still destroy a crop.<\/p>\n The Robert Craig Winery lost the entire crop of their Candlestick Vineyard, which would have generated $4.5m in revenue. Slone estimates about 10% of the vines will need to be replanted \u2013 a process that will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a decade to see new bottles of wine ready for market. The team will test grapes on another one of their vineyards closer to harvest to see whether the smoke affected them.<\/p>\n <\/span>The Pickett fire burns on a ridge above a vineyard in Pope valley, California, on 22 August 2025. <\/span> Photograph: San Francisco Chronicle\/Hearst Newspapers\/Getty Images<\/p>\n The loss comes at the end of the growing season \u2013 after Slone\u2019s vineyard had sunk nearly $1m into farming costs \u2013 and is made even more devastating because it\u2019s happened before. The memories of the 2020 Glass fire and 2018 Camp fire, which burned farther east but still sent smoke to blanket Napa\u2019s grapevines, are still fresh. \u201cIt\u2019s financially a devastating situation,\u201d said Slone.<\/p>\n The still-burning Pickett fire, which began on 21 August in northern Napa county, quickly burned through 6,800 acres (2,750 hectares), making it the San Francisco Bay Area\u2019s largest wildfire this year. Preliminary estimates show that it caused $65m in agricultural losses, largely to wine grape growers, affecting about 1,500 acres (610 hectares) of agricultural land.<\/p>\n Although that damage is significantly less than that wrought by the Glass fire \u2013 which burned through 67,000 acres (27,000 hectares) and racked up $3.7bn in losses \u2013 the growing threat of wildfires in arid California has still shaken the wine industry.<\/p>\n \u201cNorthern California wine country is one of the treasures of the United States,\u201d said Slone. \u201cIt\u2019s something that I think all Americans should be concerned about because it\u2019s a uniquely American thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Along the west coast, wine grape growers have implemented many strategies to prepare for wildfires \u2013 with the support of scientists at the US Department of Agriculture and local universities.<\/p>\n Ben Montpetit, chair of the University of California, Davis\u2019s viticulture and enology department, said in an emailed statement that the industry has employed \u201cbarrier sprays to reduce smoke uptake, annual testing to establish baseline smoke marker levels in grapes, and small-lot fermentations after smoke events to assess potential wine impact\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cResearchers are also investigating which grape cultivars are more sensitive or tolerant to smoke exposure,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve made a lot of progress in the preparedness realm,\u201d said Natalie Collins, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, who noted the industry established a smoke exposure taskforce after the losses in 2018 to aid growers after wildfires.<\/p>\n <\/span>A firefighting helicopter drops water on the Pickett fire in the hills near a vineyard on 21 August 2025 in Calistoga, California. <\/span> Photograph: Justin Sullivan\/Getty Images<\/p>\n The existence of that taskforce hints at a perennial problem for vineyards: though they can often keep wildfire off their acres, there\u2019s little that can keep smoke at bay. And if smoke sits in an area for too long, it can leave grapes tasting ashy, like a campfire.<\/p>\n \u201cSmoke taint issues are kind of fickle,\u201d said Heather Griffin, a partner at Summit Lake Vineyards and Winery. \u201cIt depends on the varietal, depends on your ripeness level and depends on how long the exposure was.\u201d<\/p>\n Griffin\u2019s family\u2019s vineyards were saved from the Pickett fire \u2013 \u201cThey stopped the fire at the end of our ridge up on Howell Mountain,\u201d she said \u2013 but they\u2019ll need to send grapes out for testing before harvest to be sure the smoke didn\u2019t taint it.<\/p>\n For the first year ever, crop insurers are offering a new coverage option called the fire insurance protection smoke index endorsement, which would insure vineyards for losses due to smoke exposure.<\/p>\n But some growers say the cost of crop insurance has become unattainable after repeated wildfires.<\/p>\n \u201cOur insurance went up so much after the fires of 2020. It literally went from $40,000 a year for really great coverage for all of our properties and inventory, and now it\u2019s $300,000 a year and covers nothing,\u201d said Slone.<\/p>\n For the 95% of Napa valley\u2019s wineries that are family-owned, that cost can be \u201ccatastrophic\u201d, he adds.<\/p>\n The wine industry has historically relied on federal funding to support USDA and university research into wildfire preparedness. Although those levels have remained steady despite widespread federal cuts, eight federal wine grape research scientists \u2013 including a smoke exposure specialist \u2013 were fired and then rehired early in the Trump administration\u2019s Doge-era cuts.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to make sure that an industry like ours continues to be protected,\u201d said Collins, as \u201cwe continue to see the writing on the wall in California that wildfires likely will continue to be an issue here\u201d.<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that some federal disaster relief funding may work its way to affected vineyards, but Griffin says buying wine from those wineries \u201chelps everybody that\u2019s up here\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cShoot them an email and buy some of their wine,\u201d added Slone. \u201cThey will be the most appreciative people on the planet Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Elton Slone and his colleagues at the Robert Craig Winery in Napa valley had gathered for their annual pre-harvest company party last week \u2013 complete with copper pot carnitas and grape tacos \u2013 when one of his co-workers noticed an alert on her phone. The Pickett fire, a blaze that had started about 10 miles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[735,667,1973,2301,2273,11434,11435,11433,315,2627,9460],"class_list":{"0":"post-18698","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-assess","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-country","11":"tag-damage","12":"tag-devastating","13":"tag-rips","14":"tag-situation","15":"tag-vineyards","16":"tag-wildfire","17":"tag-wildfires","18":"tag-wine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018Tastes like a campfire\u2019<\/h2>\n
Protecting the industry<\/h2>\n