Wine Country fires are horrible this year

 This article describes the huge, numerous, and threatening wildfires threatening people and grapes. Deaths are already being reported. Huge areas are under evacuation orders.

Epona Farm is presently 17 miles west of the area under an Evacuation Level 2 Order (meaning, "be ready to go if we issue a Level 3 order"), from a large set of fires burning on the west slope of Mt St Helens. The fires themselves are 25-35 miles away from us. The winds, which have brought us so much smoke for 3 days now and at times completely obscured the sun, are about to shift, and by Saturday we should see clear skies again. At times the smoke has been at the "unhealthy" level.

Smoke taint is caused by smoke phenols (from burning wood) attaching to grape skins and binding to sugars. Because the phenols are bound to sugars, they are not detectable in the grape (unless you run a lab test, but the labs are backlogged for weeks and the grapes are ripe now). But once the wine is made, the alcohol splits off the smoke phenol and it re-appears in the wine. At small levels it can add an interesting and nice complexifying element, but at high levels the wine is ruined, and there is no practicable fix for that fault.

Dick Erath, one of Oregon's wine pioneers, just advised me that the Willamette Valley saw more smoke than this, for more days, in a past year, and yet there was no smoke taint in their wines that year. We're in the middle of grape and apple harvest, and we'll find out once the wines are made, whether they have smoke taint. At this moment, I feel fairly confident they will not.

The Willamette Valley (and Napa and Sonoma) are under even denser smoke, so that is a threat to many many high-value commercial wines. The first photo is from Oregon (from the article I've linked here), and the second photo is from our farm (near Woodland WA) yesterday.

Don't trust your own senses, in determining whether this is a hot summer!

Here's what I just wrote to my fellow grapegrowers in SW WA (and, first, you need to know that Growing Degree Days measure heat which is a proxy for sunshine; growers use GDDs to know how warm their growing season really is):

It's been so hot for the past few days that it seems strange to get this result, but we had a late, cool Spring, and:

I know the high-lo temps for today and tomorrow, so I can calculate GDDs (F; base 50) for Jan 1, 2020 through July 31, 2020, and the total is: 1189. That is the lowest of THE PAST SEVEN YEARS.

Next, I took the 15-day forecast and used that to project all of August, and that adds 604 GDDs, for an Aug 31 total of 1793 (but if the 2nd half of August is cooler than the first half, which is normal for us to see, that 1794 estimate will end up being a bit too high). That is the lowest of the past 3 years (but not the lowest of the past 7 years).

In recent years, September has added about 500 more GDDs (it varies a lot depending whether the rains come early--last year, Sept only added 250 GDDs). So if we get "normal rain return date" (about Sept 21), that might leave us at about 2290 GDDs by Sept 30. That is better than average for this area, if you look at the past 50 years, but due to recent climate change it would also be the second-lowest of the past 7 years.

So I am going to continue dropping fruit now, to help the remainder get fully ripe, just like last year, on all my varieties except the ones that have shown they can ripen a huge load no matter the weather (only some of my modern varieties can do that). If growers let a full crop hang, I predict they may have less-ripe flavors. It's a very difficult decision to make, of course, as each grower has to think about their own fruit quality and income needs. 

Comments welcome,

Kenton

Your Education Committee Chair