Smoke Taint Concerns Linger After Santa Barbara County’s Lake Fire

Certain Pockets Near the Summertime Wildfire Reporting Damaged Grapes and Flawed Ferments

By Matt Kettman Santa Barbara Independent

Bad mezcal with a hint of soiled diaper.

This is not the tasting note anyone wants to find on a bottle of $50 grenache, but that’s about what a smoke-tainted sample of grapes grown near this past summer’s Lake Fire smells and — at least for the bold — tastes like. 

Frequency Wine Co.’s Zac Wasserman dropped a tiny bottle of affected wine off at my house a couple of weeks back, alongside a bottle of last year’s clean version. After investigating the bad one, I decided to just save the good one for later. There was no need for a direct comparison. 

“Smoke taint” is the phrase for when a wildfire’s plumes inundate a vineyard so much that smoky compounds permeate the grapes, leaving slightly toasty to rather odd to downright disgusting smells and tastes in the finished wine. Thankfully, despite Santa Barbara County’s penchant for wildfires, this is not something many vintners here have been forced to reckon with, due mostly the fortunate timing and distance of recent blazes. 

Thanks to climate change, though, smoke taint is now knocking on more cellar doors. In Santa Barbara wine country, it banged for a number of vineyards — and their grape-buying winery clients — when the Lake Fire erupted above Zaca Lake on July 5. By the time it was contained almost three weeks later, it had burned nearly 40,000 acres almost entirely across the Los Padres National Forest, and above thousands of acres of Santa Ynez Valley vineyards.

Concerns arose at that time. The hope was that, because the fire came before the grapes went through veraison — a critical maturation point in which they turn color from green to gold or red — the impacts would be minimal. By and large, that appears to be true for most of Santa Barbara County, where the bulk of vineyards, from the Sta. Rita Hills to Happy Canyon, appear to have been adequately far from steady smoke. 

But as harvest went forward, it quickly became apparent that smoke problems did exist. The most public acknowledgement came on October 14 from Fess Parker Winery, which emailed its club members to say that the 2024 harvest from Rodney’s Vineyard was negatively impacted by the Lake Fire. 

“Out of concern, we tested the various blocks extensively and many of them came back positive for high levels of smoke taint,” it read. “These results have led us to make the difficult decision to not harvest and produce wine from any of the red grape varietals grown on our estate vineyard this year. While this is terribly disappointing, we simply won’t take the chance of compromising the quality of our estate programs under the Fess Parker and Epiphany labels.” 

The email went on to explain that the white grapes from Rodney’s remained viable. It also emphasized that the winery’s other sources of fruit, particularly for pinot noir and chardonnay in the Sta. Rita Hills, were not impacted at all.

While smoke taint is relatively new for Santa Barbara vintners, the open acknowledgment of it was definitely cutting-edge for the industry at large. That email surprised many, and was quickly applauded by others. 

When I spoke to Fess Parker Winery’s president Tim Snider a week after the email went out, he was pleased that they did it. “It seemed pretty obvious that we should share that outcome with people and especially our team,” he explained. “We wanted to make sure our team was prepared to properly answer questions as questions started to arise.”

He always wanted to make sure everyone knew that it was a “localized” incident. “It’s this single vineyard, but it’s not affecting broad swaths of Santa Barbara County, and definitely not our chardonnay and pinot noir,” said Snider. “We were thoughtful in terms of how we were conveying the point.”

Turning Tide winemaker Alisa Jacobson thought Fess Parker’s admission was the right move. “It’s better than being scared or hiding about it,” she said. “That’s not gonna help.” 

Read the rest of the article on The Santa Barbara Independent’s website