The Climate Crisis Is Changing the Taste of Wine

When the fires come, as they have for the past five years in California wine country, there is little winemakers can do.

This is Through the Grapevine, a column by Meg Bernhard about wine and power.

The wine in my glass tasted like drought. It was hot, red-hot. My face blushed; my forehead tingled. I took another sip. Heady. Dense. Alcohol near 15 percent.

It was a winter afternoon in central Spain, where I’d moved after college to learn how to make wine. I was standing in my friend Carmen’s cellar amid a dozen wooden barrels and 10,000-liter vats of red wine. We were drinking a wine made from Graciano grapes that she harvested a few months before, in August of 2017. That year was the hottest in Spain since the country started monitoring annual temperatures, in 1965. Reservoirs evaporated; rivers ran dry. The cobbled remains of Santa Marta, an abandoned village in a lush part of the country, had emerged from the man-made lake that had engulfed them for decades. Farmers mourned their ruined crops, looked to the sky for salvation. Yet the sky gave little, only forty-seven centimeters of rain.

Wine, Carmen told me as we swirled the ruby liquid in our glasses, tells the story of the year, of the land. It tells of dryness and wetness, storms and serenity. The taste of the year is subtle, present in the sweetness, the bitterness, the acidity of the drink. Such flavors are legible to the people who know to taste for them. But even I, who didn’t yet know how to read wine, could tell when something was amiss.

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When I returned to California in mid-April 2021, after a few years in Europe and another on the East Coast, I was curious what stories wine could tell about my home state. I didn’t know California wine at all—I left home at seventeen, too young to visit wineries—but I wondered if I would find some glimmer of recognition, some memory from my childhood articulated in its flavor. Growing up near Southern California’s desert, I always spent my first weeks of school sweating in the August heat. In late September, Santa Ana winds would kick up dust during my soccer games. One October, the Witch Creek Fire in San Diego, whose suffocating smoke traveled forty miles north to my hometown, shuttered schools for a few days. In the intervening decade, fires have become more destructive and more frequent. Last year, the August Complex Fire alone burned more than a million acres, making it the largest in state history.

What, I wondered, does a wildfire taste like?

To find out, I spent the summer of 2021 seeking out wine made in California. In July, I traveled to Napa Valley for a tasting. By then, I was living in Oakland, 450 miles north of home and just a few minutes from the San Francisco Bay, a world away from the California I knew. But in some places on the drive to Napa, the landscape looked familiar—parched, dusty, brittle. Sitting in the back seat, I watched as the golden hills unfurled beside me. Some were smeared charcoal, marking the destructive path of wildfires from years past. A road sign asked, “Ready for wildfire? What’s your escape route?”

When I stepped out of the car, a wave of dry heat washed over my face, as though I’d opened an oven. The air smelled of sage and chaparral, of kindling. The year before, wildfires had ravaged Napa Valley’s eastern hills, burning several wineries to the ground. The quantity of grapes pressed for wine was down 40 percent, due to fires, the state’s drought, and smoke, which had damaged many surviving grapes.

Like cigarette smoke embedded in motel-room carpets, wildfire smoke is nearly impossible to extract from wine. Smoke molecules bind with sugar, the compound that makes fermentation possible—meaning that once smoke permeates grape skin, it’s there to stay. The worst-hit wines were the valley’s famed—and expensive—Cabernets, those late-maturing, heavy reds whose harvest falls during peak wildfire season and whose fermenting grape juice requires extended time steeping with skins. Many winemakers decided to forgo bottling Cabs at all, worried smoke taint would tarnish their reputations.

At the tasting, I asked to try wildfire wine, and to my surprise the sommelier poured a white variety—a Riesling—that was infected with smoke (the wines usually affected are reds, because they ferment with their skins). The winery had tried to mask the smoke by permitting the wine to undergo a stage of fermentation—called malolactic fermentation—uncommon for the variety. The Rieslings I had tried during my time in Europe were light and fruity, but this one was muted, smelling faintly of tobacco. I raised the glass to my lips and frowned, imagining infernal, orange skies. Some winemakers told me smoke-tainted wine tasted like an ashtray. Another said it was like the steam from water used to put out a campfire. Embers, cigarettes, barbecue—I’ve heard all these words before. When I drink wine, I rely less on words and more on intuition. To me, wildfire feels more than it tastes—like a subtle burn at the back of the throat, a burn that lingers.

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Most everyone in Northern California has a wildfire story. They can tell you about the peculiar darkness that falls when smoke eclipses the sun. They can tell you about watching flames rush over a distant ridge, glowing in the night. They can tell you about evacuating on winding country roads, only to backtrack when those roads were closed. They can tell you about what they lost: wedding rings, photos, gardens.

I saw wildfires up close during the summer of 2017. It was a terribly hot summer, as was the one before and every summer after. At the Los Angeles Times, where I was working, we published stories about heat records, heat illness, heat death. I was sent to cover blazes in the middle of the state—Santa Barbara, Kern County, the Yosemite Valley, California’s iconic landscapes choked with ash. The state’s department of forestry and fire protection gave the newsroom a safety seminar. Always carry fire-resistant coats and boots in the trunk, our instructor told us. Bring more water than you think you’ll need. Know your exit routes. Don’t park on dry grass. Keep the car engine on, in case you need a quick escape.

With our press passes, journalists could bypass barricades and drive into the zone where firefighters were working. My photographer colleague, always first to the scene, would throw grass to the wind to gauge the direction of the fire, then follow the smoke.

Unlike photographers, reporters behind the barricades weren’t usually interested in chasing fires. We wanted the human story: the guy with the garden hose trying to save his house. I talked to those people—men and women who lost their houses and lived in campers, wondering where to go next. In the months after the devastation, they suffered from flashbacks. Fireworks terrified them; the smell of campfires was nauseating. One afternoon, I interviewed a man who had recently tried to save his cattle ranch deep in the hills near Santa Barbara. Navigating the rough terrain in his truck, he showed me burn scars on land that was once ochre. “It’s a moonscape,” he told me. Everything was gone.

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The part of California where I grew up has been spared the fires; nothing I love there has burned. But it’s becoming dangerously hot and dry. When I was a child, yard signs read “brown is the new green,” encouraging residents to turn off their sprinklers. I ran with the track team in ninety-degree weather and once fainted during a soccer game on a scorching afternoon. Three years ago, during a heatwave, one of my mother’s chickens fell ill in its coop, then died. Temperatures are regularly in the triple digits. Rainfall is cause for celebration.

Drought wines have another taste altogether. They are alcoholic and rich. Strained for water, vines produce fewer grapes than normal, and, in turn, sugars are concentrated in those surviving grapes, making the wine heavier and more intense in flavor. Vines are hardy plants, generally well-adapted to water scarcity. But extreme lack, and extreme heat, can stunt grapes’ growth entirely.

According to the US Drought Monitor, 47 percent of the state—including Napa and Sonoma counties—is currently suffering “exceptional drought,” the most severe of its categories. In August, Central Valley water authorities banned farmers from using rivers for irrigation. For the first time ever, the state shut down Lake Oroville’s hydroelectric plant, warning that the water levels would soon be insufficient to generate power. Hundreds of thousands of salmon have died in the Klamath River, where the lack of water has allowed parasites to flourish. In the face of these facts, my friends and I gravitate toward water to recall its abundance. A friend walked into the mist the other day, fantasizing that morning dew might instead be a spitting rain. I seek out redwoods, picturing water coursing up their massive trunks from the soil deep beneath my feet.

The US Drought Monitor has compiled the most apocalyptic facts into a bullet point list:

• Fields are left fallow

• Orchards are removed

• Vegetable yields are low

• Honey harvest is small

• Fish rescue and relocation begins

• Pine beetle infestation occurs

• Forest mortality is high

• Wetlands dry up

• Survival of native plants and animals is low

• Fewer wildflowers bloom

• Wildlife death is widespread

• Algae blooms appear

The list could also include: Vines are weakened, endangering future crops. Photosynthesis is inhibited; grapes cannot ripen. Harvest, once a time of joy, becomes a time of unease. One wildfire, one hot spell, could wipe out years’ worth of labor. When there is no water, there are no grapes.

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As I write, it is August in Oakland and the sky is dim. The fog rolling in from the San Francisco Bay does not break; by midday, it has warped into a stagnant haze. It’s only the beginning of wildfire season and already I am losing track. Is this smoke from the Dixie Fire? The Antelope Fire? Wildfires, I’ve learned, get their names from the places they originated. Country roads. Rural towns. Mountain peaks. I wonder what the next one will be christened.

Watching the inferno sky take shape, I realize harvest is already underway in some parts of the state. In other areas, winemakers are anxiously waiting to pick. Some try to prepare for the inevitable. They graft vines onto drought-resistant rootstocks. They prune vines so that leaves may eventually shade grapes from sunburn, or they remove leaves so that grapes might ripen faster for earlier picking. They pick earlier anyway—making wine that is more acidic and less alcoholic—to avoid harvesting during the worst wildfire months, September and October.

When the fires come, as they have for the past five years in California wine country, there is little winemakers can do. They leave their grapes hanging on the vine to collect ash; they abandon their juice in the cellar as it’s fermenting. They use temperature controls in fermenting tanks to separate grape juice from ash. They make rosés instead of reds, removing smoky skins before the taste of wildfire overwhelms. This is to say: They adapt.

In other parts of the world, climate change is also altering wines. Where it was once too cold to grow vines, in places like England or Vermont, farmers are now finding warmer temperatures suitable for viticulture. Elsewhere, the changes are devastating. Unseasonable hail and frost have destroyed crops in France. Germany’s vineyards were washed out during this summer’s floods. In warmer regions, alcohol is creeping up. Those wines taste like a heating planet.

When the world is on fire, wine may not seem a particularly grievous loss. But if, recalling my friend Carmen’s words, wines are a historical record—of the land, the climate, the people who make it—they are also memory keepers, reminding us of a time when the earth was able to produce such a drink. The wines of the past are long gone.

The other day, I drove to Treasure Island to help a friend bottle his 2020 wines. Last year, he told me, was “pretty miserable.” Lightning storms struck Santa Cruz and Mendocino counties, where he grows grapes, resulting in a series of wildfires that burned more than a million acres. Ash covered his vineyards, and smoke during harvest made breathing difficult. With his red grape varieties, he decided to make rosés to avoid the worst effects of smoke taint. “Pink wines,” he said, shaking his head. He was bored of them, but as long as wildfire smoke choked up his harvests, stronger red wines were not viable.

When we finished work for the day, my friend gifted me and the other helpers a few bottles from 2020. I thought about saving them for a while, to recall the time and place from which they came, that year of fire and storms and heat. But they’re young wines, meant to be drunk soon, so one evening, I opened a bottle to share. It was cool and light, like water.