It doesn’t taste pruny or overripe it has lots of red fruits. Luckily it’s 25 cases that I don’t need to make a living on. Going to consult with some friends and make a plan.
Roy, yes and my experience with 2020 Napa fruit (from all over the valley and hillsides) is similar to yours. Proximity to the fire and amount of time exposed to fresh smoke (smoke coming from an actively burning fire, not lingering in the air for multiple days after first developed or blows in from out of the area) have led to the highest smoke taint marker numbers from tests. Also the most easily perceptible smoke characteristics from a sensory perspective. There’s also a big difference between varietals, even within the same vineyard and their smoke results.
Regarding free run vs. press, once you’ve been on skins in tank for any length of time you basically have a slurry. I’m not all that surprised that we’re not seeing wildly differing results between the two.
I heard about some roses being badly tainted.
That simply can’t be. All the reports lately claim there is no smoke taint in any vineyards, up and down the coast /s Slightly pregnant and all…
I understand this to be possible. It is dependent on severity of smoke taint in the fruit.
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I know that this is what people have been saying, but in our experience, this isn’t true. Our smokiest lot was in Saratoga, really far from any fires, and only exposed to old smoke. You can smell the smoke just pouring the wine into a glass. We have some Napa cab that was really close to fires, that is totally clean. We had chardonnay in Dry Creek that a cinder literally fell out of the cluster when I sampled, and tested completely clean after a mini ferment on the skins.
Leslie, very interesting results that you’re seeing. I’m super curious about why that is. Without knowing much about your specific vineyard locations or relevant smoke exposure I couldn’t even wager as to why your results have been what they are.
My first hand experience from 2008, 2017, 2018 and now 2020 all point to sensory and/or lab analysis that show proximity to fires as most impactful and length of exposure to fresh smoke as leading to the highest results of smoke taint (both sensory and lab analysis of volatile phenol markers). I am mainly working with red varietals, mostly Bordeaux, so can’t comment on Chardonnay.
Feel free to DM me if you want to discuss more. This is likely our new normal here in CA and I’m all for sharing information.
Cheers,
Michael
I will happily post results from AWRI once we receive the final numbers next week after they’re out of lockdown.
I can think of potential reasons some Saratoga sites could’ve been tainted. The most plausible would be topographical. There were fires up along the summit. A channel leading down to the site could protect the densest smoke from dilution, greatly countering much of the time it took to get there. Also, if some or all of a vineyard are in a bowl, or even if there’s a barely lower undrained section (some of these are difficult to perceive walking a site), you could get a pooling effect. where the denser airborne particulates concentrate. The taint in an area like that could potentially be several times that of a site the smoke passed through getting there. You see the pooling effect with frost damage to grapes and other crops, where the densest (coldest) air gets trapped. LANDSAT imaging helped solve the mystery of this agricultural phenomenon.
The “Research Results” page of the American Vineyard Foundation website has several studies linked to preventing, detecting, and treating smoke taint…
AVF website: “Smoke Taint” Research Results
AVF website: ALL Research Results
Sorry, realize this was months ago but: minimize skin contact as much as possible, consider adding a fining agent (activated charcoal), reverse osmosis (expensive) are all options. Similarly, there are certain yeast strains that will bring out naturally fruity characteristics in some wines, masking the smokiness. All this being said, nothing is actually proven, and smoke taint can seemingly return at any time.
In his 2020 vintage report, Ken Wright mentions ozone treatment. We have used ozone at our factory to treat smoke reside after a fire at an adjacent commercial building.
It is amazingly effective, but ozone is a powerful oxidizer. It is used as an alternative to bleach for sanitation, and has the potential for similar degradation of organic compounds other than the ones you wish to target.
Any winemakers here have any experience with ozone?
We did an ozone wash on 2017 Flora with some success. For proximity, fire was less than a mile across the highway and Coffee park is about a mile south. My business partner, Brent wrote something up but we never published. It was hard to know if the Flora was done with metabolization and that may have reduced the smoke impact.
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David,
First an apology for not answering sooner. How is the wine showing? I made Pinot’s in the 2008 vintage in Anderson Valley. After that experience and having tasted some of the wines at a now 10 year interval, here are my suggestions.
- taste it, if you don’t have “wet ashtray” (you’ll know what I mean) don’t worry or do anything different from normal.
- if you do have “wet ashtray” leave on leas for about 4 months, rack clean and add yeast hulls.
-2a) repeat at about 6 months and areate or if possible sparge w/CO2.
Rick Davis ITB
Hi Rick thank you for your insights and suggestions. We have tasted the Pinot a couple of times and no wet ashtray flavors. It actually tastes “pretty” at this point but I’m hoping it fleshes out a bit once we bottle. I just make wine in my garage so I don’t have any real financial exposure unlike so many vintners here in CA.
Hope you and others are spared any taint in these 2020 wines.
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David,
Where was the fruit from, curious because I’ve seen affected and unaffected fruit from the same AVA this year.
Hi Rick it was from southern Sonoma County. Don’t know if it is an AVA just from someone’s personal vineyard.
I’ve got one strong recommendation and one more tentative one. The strong one is to establish your own baseline numbers from non-smoke years by putting together a composite of several vintages representing your vineyard, your barrel program, fermentation regimen, etc. and sending it to ETS. That’s a way better reference point than the guidelines ETS has developed for bucket ferments. The more tentative recommendation is Enartis Fenol Free as a fining agent.
Here’s my smoke story, to date. 2020 was the first time I’d had smoke at vine-level in the vineyard. I had elevated guaiacol numbers on berry samples, though those results didn’t come back until the wine was in barrel. Several times, I got strong whiffs of apple cider spice during crush, which I figured was guaiacol/eugenol. Still, I pressed my luck with one lot, that was comprised of my very best grapes, and kept the juice on the stems and skins for 4 weeks – too long. I had hedged my bets with 3 other lots and gone with less whole cluster and earlier pressing. So, I fought the conventional wisdom and the conventional wisdom won when the extended maceration lot turned out to show some smoky character. I’ll say that I don’t think I’m very sensitive to smoke myself. I thought this lot was possibly smoky, but the ETS numbers were more definite. So, I fined that lot with Fenol Free and hit all the lots with chitosan (which is my normal post-ML practice anyway). Fenol Free is carbon that Enartis touts as effective against smoke taint. I’d trialed other carbon products on whites and found them really deleterious, but the trials with Fenol Free showed it to be pretty benign and effective on the pinot. This smoky lot was only 8 barrels, and I blended it with 15 other barrels to form a single lot for the bulk market. I thought it tasted ok and ran it by another winemaker, just to be sure. Once you decide you have an insensitivity to something, you imagine that thing is lurking everywhere, undetected. Anyway, we agreed it was fine, and I sent it off to ETS for confirmation. When the results came back with 6 micrograms/L of guaiacol, which is pretty significant on the ETS bucket ferment guideline, I was pretty bummed. I figured I’d be calling VA Filtration for that lot. Those guidelines don’t account for any oak contact, so it wasn’t a great reference point for a lot that had been in oak (25% new). I figured stems might also be a confounding factor. I submitted a sample of a mix of three preceding vintages, which had no smoke contact, and just got back result of 8.4 micrograms/L – a baseline significantly higher than the bulk blend that I had thought was in jeopardy. Needless to say, I’m relieved.
Sounds entirely believable that you could have gotten elevated gaulacol from barrels, it can come from oak and also seems to be an artifact of cold sites. The real question is what the methyl-qualacol levels are. methyl-g is a product of smoke contamination only. Extensive consumer trials indicate that most people find 6gualacol levels above 6ppb objectionable, though that probably is due to the presense of methyl-g above 2ppb.
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