![]() That October, a string of fires - including the Tubbs Fire, the most destructive in state history up to that point - burned more than 110,700 acres in Napa and Sonoma counties. Major wildfires first seriously threatened a California wine region - Mendocino County - in 2008, but not until 2017 did they pose a significant danger to the state’s most hallowed vines. Sure enough, the longer the wine was in my mouth, the more sooty and dead it tasted and the more I wanted to spit it out. “Because there’s a lot there to mask,” Oberholster said, meaning the wine’s other qualities - its fruit and tannins and acid - were strong enough to compete with any smoke compounds, at least initially. When the wine first touched my tongue, it tasted like something in the vicinity of berry juice. The third Cabernet smelled better than the others. It had the most exposure of the three Cabernets, she added. This wine’s grapes came from the Napa Valley floor, Oberholster said, where the smoke from the Glass Fire had lingered for days. Now the wine smelled like a spent, day-old cigarette. The flavor seemed stunted, as if it were about to reveal itself but then decided it would rather not. Lifting the second glass to my nose, I thought I detected bacon. Would she consider this an extremely tainted wine? “It goes through phases,” she said. ![]() It’s unfresh.” I spat the wine into a blue pail and took another sip. If you take enough, it hits you at the back of the nose. “There is smoke there,” Oberholster continued, “but you need to look for it, and you need to separate it from the fruit and everything else. These grapes were picked from a hillside where the Glass Fire had come right up to the vineyard but the smoke hadn’t lingered. Cold means less volatile, which means less aromatic. “They’re a bit cold, unfortunately,” she said. Oberholster poured samples of the three wines, and we both picked up the leftmost glass and stuck our noses in. ![]() These compounds are precursors to smoke flavors, but they’re time bombs - becoming noticeable to the palate only after fermentation and, in some cases, only after a wine has been aged. When smoke enters a vineyard, these volatile phenols get absorbed by grapes enzymes in the grape then bind the phenols with sugars to create as many as 40 new compounds. Grapes aren’t the only crop that can be affected by smoke, but their permeable skins, and the very sensitivity that allows vintners to produce expressive, complex wines, make them uniquely vulnerable. ![]() When trees burn, lignin, a chemical compound that gives wood much of its structure, releases into the smoke a range of volatile phenols, a class of airborne molecules. Oberholster, an exacting South African–born chemist at UC Davis’s Department of Viticulture and Enology, is the closest thing California has to an expert on smoke and wine, and after the fire died down, wineries began sending her clusters of grapes and samples of wine in the desperate hope that she could help them prepare for the next disaster. Nearly 30 wineries were ravaged by fire, but far more difficult to gauge was the damage wrought by smoke - which can travel, unstoppable, over a larger swath of land and seep into any vineyard’s fruit. They had all been made from grapes harvested after the Glass Fire, a blaze that tore through Napa, burning almost 68,000 acres and turning the skies orange. The bottles, which came from vineyards in the Napa Valley, contained Cabernet Sauvignon from the 2020 vintage. Instead of a label, each bore a white strip that read sample for research, along with a cryptic string of letters and numbers. We were standing in the teaching-and-research winery at the University of California, Davis, the country’s preeminent incubator of future grape growers and vintners, and on the table in front of us were three identical wine bottles with red screw caps. Anita Oberholster wouldn’t say what we were drinking.
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