WINE & WILDFIRE
What the wine industry’s adaptations to wildfire smoke tell us about the future of food & drink in Washington State.
WRITTEN BY MEGHNA JARADI
ILLUSTRATION BY WYNONNA SUSILO
[THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15] Washington State’s wildfire season is drawing to a close, but has left more than half a million acres of burned land in its wake, totaling more than two percent of the state’s land area. In August, fires in Spokane County forced at least 65,000 residents to evacuate, and destroyed more than 800 homes. On the 1.4-million-acre Colville Indian Reservation, approximately 200,000 acres burned this year; more than 1 million acres have burned there since 2014.
Wildfires are “not just the occasional disaster” and can’t be treated that way, according to Ricardo Pelai, a climate researcher for Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability think tank. “Wildfires will become a normal part of our lives,” he said, adding that fire-afflicted landscapes have historically been naturally flammable, and are more than likely to burn again.
And where there’s fire, there’s smoke. Smoke often drifts well beyond the immediate site of a burn to create apocalyptic-looking, sometimes carcinogenic scenes: orange skies, a blocked-out sun, an acrid smell and taste in the air.
Wildfire smoke has garnered growing media attention over the past few years as its presence has become a late summer fixture. (News outlets didn’t previously display air quality index readings on their home pages.) But, among other crises, the consequences of wildfire smoke on the food we grow, and what that might mean for how we eat and drink in the years to come, remains undercovered.
Perhaps surprisingly, the wine industry offers a well-researched hint at what might happen to Washington State’s food systems over time. “Smoke season” tends to coincide with peak harvest time. Smoke exposure can “taint” grapes and make wine taste bad: potentially ruinous for a multi-billion-dollar industry.
In the face of that threat, wine industry experts have investigated ways to adapt to and mitigate the effects of wildfire smoke over the last two decades. They’ve looked at changing the kinds of grapes they grow. They’ve considered relaxing labeling standards. And they’ve even worked on technological solutions, like designing small, charcoal-lined bags to block smoke from individually wrapped grape clusters — an effective, yet tedious and costly process.
The sum of this research suggests our foodways are fundamentally in flux. What we eat and drink now might not be here to stay. What’s considered “local” might soon be diluted. What feeds us might soon become more of a luxury than it already is. And, amidst the triage that wildfires force us to conduct, we’ll have to consider whether the ways we’ve lived with food, and grown it, have to fundamentally change.
Little treat culture shows up in a big way in Washington. We are the second-largest wine-producing state in the US, contributing more than $10 billion to our economy annually, according to the Washington State Wine Commission. That’s about 51,000 jobs and over 4 million tourist visits. Any hardship endured here has an economic ripple effect: In smoke events, aromatic compounds, called volatile phenols, can bind to plant sugars to reveal ashy off-flavors during winemaking, resulting in crop and product loss.
Two colleagues working in wine told me they considered “smoke-tainted” bottles faulty, and would return them to the winemaker where possible. Granted, not all smoke flavors are inherently bad: At a tasting event at Walter’s Wine Shop in West Seattle, I overheard Bree Stock, Oregon’s first Master of Wine, highlight the naturally occurring smoky notes of Mencía grapes, which are native to Spain and Portugal, but also grown locally. Smoke just isn’t a desired tasting note in every bottle.
According to Martin Fujishin, Director of Enology & Viticulture at Walla Walla Community College, the true impact of smoke is nuanced. “The inside of a [wine] barrel being toasted will quite often cause a wine to show the same phenolic compounds,” he said. “It's not always so black and white: It's quite often degrees of smoke taint.” The college’s wine library contains examples of 2020’s smoke-impacted vintages, often poured for students and lab experiments.
“The international wine and grape-growing communities' understanding about what smoke taint is, how it's occurring, and what our expectations should be as an industry when we start to see smoke show up in our communities [has evolved] over the last 20 years,” he said.
Ricardo Pelai of Sightline illustrated Washington wine country’s high wildfire impact by pointing to US Department of Agriculture satellite data. “The [top five wine-producing] counties have experienced 20-plus heavy smoke days [this season],” he said. ”The season is not even over yet: It ends in November.” Vineyards might not be at direct risk, he added, but smoke can “turn wildfire from a local problem into a regional problem or a statewide problem.”
Walla Walla had already experienced 24 heavy smoke days from near-range fires when I spoke to Fujishin in mid-August. He described how smoke chemistry changes as it travels: It comes into contact with humidity, ozone, and sunlight. Well-traveled phenolic compounds oxidize and become less absorbent when they make contact with grapes and leaves.
Washington State is also the nation's top producer of apples and hops. A recent memo from the Brewers Association called for more research to examine “flavor and aroma carryover of smoke taint characteristics in hops to beer,” suggesting the sector’s research lags behind the wine industry’s. The impact is already palpable: A brewer colleague I spoke to suggested some lot selections on the hop market are being denied because of smoke taint, too.
Winemakers ultimately surrender to the process. “As a living organism… we can very rarely predict exactly how that wine is going to change over time chemically in the bottle,” Fujishin said. “In many cases, we're pleasantly surprised that smoke taint has mitigated itself as [the wine ages].”
Professor Kerry Wilkinson is a wine scientist researching the impacts of bushfire smoke’s impact on vineyards at Adelaide University in Australia. Wilkinson has developed a successful method of smoke-taint prevention involving the application of activated carbon fabric to the grapevine fruit zone, which absorbs smoke taint compounds.
Applying the fabric to individual fruit clusters is highly effective, but laborious. “We gave up on this approach after it took us more than three minutes to apply fabric bags to about half a vine,” she said, “but field trials where we applied the activated carbon fabric… yielded promising results.”
It’s not currently possible to deploy this solution at scale during a fire event: too many bags and hands. According to Bree Stock, most wine regions are still hand-harvested, and red flag days — those above 95 degrees Fahrenheit — are now commonplace during grape harvest season. Vineyard workers make about 70 percent of their income in that period. Although Oregon’s labor force standards for agricultural workers are some of the most protective in the nation, requiring access to shade, cool drinking water, additional breaks, respirators and masks, and more; Washington’s standards are not as stringent.
Wildfire has always been a naturally occurring part of the Pacific Northwest’s landscape. Indigenous communities have practiced fire stewardship in Eastern Washington since time immemorial to eliminate excess undergrowth and promote biodiversity, including the cultivation of “first foods” like berries and medicinal roots. Twentieth-century fire suppression policies changed that, and contributed to a buildup of dead vegetation or “fuel loads” that amplify the severity of wildfires today.
“A lot of knowledge has been lost,” Ricardo Pelai said. “Now there are… efforts to revitalize that knowledge and to allow those practices to emerge once again.”
Settler governments now occasionally deploy Indigenous practices to mitigate wildfire risk, and they’ve sometimes had to factor in the impacts of controlled burns on local agriculture, including vineyards. In Australia, Prof. Wilkinson served as an expert witness in a court case where controlled burns were conducted near a vineyard to protect a nearby community. The court acknowledged that the burn caused smoke taint, but concluded that “the protection of life and property was more important than the production of wine,” Wilkinson said.
How such rulings might set a precedent for, say, a wheat field or a dairy farm affected by smoke are uncertain; the line between “life” and “property” is hazy, especially as agriculture supports our continued living. Often, these court cases frame humans, what we eat, and our environments as separate entities. This may not be possible for much longer.
Controlled burns are just one tool for managing severe fires, but they’re harder to carry out when affluence, human development, and agriculture have sprawled into historically flammable landscapes. Much like a floodplain, wildfire-prone land is likely to burn again, Pelai shared. Local tribes are left in a lurch, often lacking the resources to retrofit homes, and, following a violent history of sovereign territory ceded, fewer options for relocation.
Both Fujishin and Stock pointed to wildfire events in Bordeaux and Burgundy this summer as a foreshadowing of how the wine industry might weather industry impacts. In Europe, wine is “considered an agricultural product” and is “open to the same agricultural subsidies as corn or soybeans would be [here],” Stock said. She predicted that government subsidies are almost guaranteed to kick in to offset wildfire loss for generations-old vineyards in Europe. In the US, where winemaking is a comparatively new, highly privatized industry, that kind of public-sector response is less likely.
To a practiced palate, wine will taste different moving forward: the grapes, their origins, and their treatment.
“We're working to have later ripening varieties with more tannin structure and more [flavor complexity],” said Bree Stock, who is also a winemaker at Limited Addition Wines and Concinnitas Farm in Oregon. Wine grapes that hit peak ripeness at the tail end of smoke season are fire adaptive: Fewer crops are lost because smoke compounds bind to sugars in ripe fruit.
Stock has an inside perspective on the nimble adaptations shaping our regional wine culture. Winemakers are tinkering with their recipes, as seen in the way blancs de noirs are popping up across Oregon’s Willamette Valley. In this instance, red grapes are pressed for juice, and outer skins are discarded before fermentation. “At first, it was a novelty, but I think now it will become a necessity,” she said.
A whole region adapting to widespread crop loss might upend what it means to eat and drink “local.” American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) are geographic boundaries that define grape-growing regions. Boundaries may dissolve in smoky years. There may be a need to change AVA standards so that winemakers can purchase fruit or wine from areas that haven’t been impacted, helping them “dilute that impact of smoke or create a viable product,” Stock said.
Agricultural solutions can mitigate some worker safety concerns, but true “sustainability” is only possible when we consider the human cost of doing business. “If you're growing grapes that require harvesting at the peak of wildfire season, then you need to be considering the health of your workforce,” Stock said. “You can't be sending people into smoke conditions with unhealthy AQI indexes just to get your fruit off the vine.”
The week of smoky skies during 2020’s destructive wildfires were the closest I’ve ever gotten to those kinds of working conditions. I was wearing a cotton mask and checking hourly air quality reports before going to work in an open-air beer garden shortly after COVID-era restaurant re-openings.
Urgently sending workers out in poor conditions felt particularly like capitalistic excess when I learned that smoke-tainted wine can be treated via methods like carbon fining or reverse osmosis before bottling — but treated wine ends up losing some of its flavor, and with it, the ability to fetch a high price. For better or for worse, remediation methods strip wine of smoky off-flavors, and everything else wine drinkers have come to associate with “terroir.”
As climate change manifests through other major changes — from December’s deadly floods, to an upcoming, potentially historic El Niño — its cumulative effect on agricultural systems beyond wine isn’t fully certain. But wine is showing hints of where we might be headed. An expanded need to ship fruit and veg from other places, a dilution of “local” origin to erase traces of local calamities, a move toward costly technologies to uphold what we presently know and taste, and a deeper occupational risk to the people who tend the land. The ways we’ve lived with and grown food will fundamentally change in our lifetimes.
What’s to be done, beyond new grapes, new labeling and labor standards, and new technologies? For one, there’s policy: As a follow-up to this piece, I’ll be reporting on Washington State’s efforts to reinforce food-system resilience and wildfire preparedness during the next state-level legislative session, which begins in January.
The State Legislature cut $60 million in funding for wildfire prevention last year, only to later restore those funds following an uproar from Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s Commissioner of Public Lands, and others. That these funds were even temporarily on the chopping block, especially amidst federal cuts to wildfire fighting, suggests a dangerous disconnect between policymakers and their practical understanding of Washington State geography and landscapes.
Following the devastating fires in Spokane, as well as many other parts of the state and region, lawmakers will likely look for ways to prevent more of the state from catching fire due to uncontrolled blazes. How to do that while Olympia drafts an austerity budget is unclear. We’ll be on the case to see how politicians react to this ongoing crisis, and with it, how we might adapt to more fire and smoke.
Meghna Jaradi is a Seattle-based food writer and the founder of Thali Creative, an interdisciplinary food-focused creative consultancy.
Wynonna Susilo (she/her) is an art therapist and art practitioner based in Seattle. Born in Indonesia and a former resident of Singapore, Wynonna incorporates a variety of modalities into her work, including charcoal drawing and Batik, a centuries-old Indonesian textile tradition.