Obviously, we need to start this by sending wishes and prayers to all of our friends in the wake of the fires in \u2018wine country\u2019.\u00a0 The loss of life is horrific and the extensive damage to property, still being assessed, is clearly catastrophic.\u00a0 Our heartfelt sorrows go out in particular to those who lost their homes and businesses.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There are a lot of folks who will be offering condolences.\u00a0 The media has, and will, be full of articles about people\u2019s heroics, first responders, and other encouraging tales about the human spirit.\u00a0 It does seems like there have been way too many disasters this year in particular.\u00a0\u00a0 There are a lot of people that will tell you they know how you feel, but most don\u2019t.\u00a0 Being helpless in the face of an overwhelming tragedy isn\u2019t something most humans have had to experience over the last few decades.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Around here, we\u2019ve had a bit of an inkling (more than we cared to) of what NoCal has been going through as three of the \u2018characters\u2019 in our own Winex crew were far too close for comfort to the Corona fire a couple of weeks ago and Canyon Fire 2 early this week.\u00a0 Having to decide what to save, considering the immediate and long-term importance of the item, and to have to make those decisions within a very short period of time and under duress, is scary enough in itself.\u00a0\u00a0 Our people were fortunate to be beyond the final perimeter in those cases, but others weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It\u2019s certainly fair to say that some of us down here didn\u2019t realize how bad things were in Napa and Sonoma because we had our own disaster going.\u00a0 It was amusing to hear the national news people talk about our fires as \u2018just outside of L.A.\u2019\u00a0 We\u2019re an hour south on a good day and substantially more in traffic.\u00a0 In any case we have been \u2018shaken and stirred\u2019 here to the point where we might vaguely be able to sense the situation up there.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We actually weren\u2019t sure what to do given the events of the past week.\u00a0 We know a lot of people in the north, and have friends that did lose houses.\u00a0 But we also figured that a people are a little tired of hearing about things burning.\u00a0 We\u2019re supposed to be the \u2018fun\u2019 place.\u00a0 But this particular set of horrific events is right in our own back yard and, both as wine merchants and Californians, we thought we needed to say something.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The only point we would make falls in line with that whole \u2018the wine business isn\u2019t like any other\u2019 thing.\u00a0 Given the fact that there are still fires raging up there it is still too soon to assess the damage.\u00a0 There have been more fatalities, more evacuations and more structures burned.\u00a0 Obviously, we aren\u2019t trying to make light of anything.\u00a0 But we are starting to see articles about \u2018what happens next\u2019 and \u2018rebuilding\u2019.\u00a0 That caused us to ponder a little about \u2018wine\u2019 things.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
How do you rebuild? \u00a0Let\u2019s say you are a winery.\u00a0\u00a0 There\u2019s no \u2018good\u2019 timing for a fire but right now is harvest.\u00a0 There are still some \u2018ready\u2019 grapes on the vine, possibly partly scorched, heat damaged, or affected by smoke.\u00a0 Even if they were still ok (apparently there were cases where the expanse of green healthy vines in a vineyard acted as something of a firebreak for crops, homes and buildings), how are wineries going to get to them?\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t sound particularly healthy or safe to put a crew on picking.\u00a0\u00a0 So, a lot of grapes are going to be lost in the vineyard.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If you were one of the luckier ones in this earlier harvest, a lot of your grapes are harvested and fermenting.\u00a0 But a lot of folks can\u2019t get to their wineries to do some of the simple things essential to the basic making of the wine.\u00a0 As we have said many times on these pages, timing is an essential part of the winemaking equation.\u00a0 Not everyone does things the same way, but each winemaker has a protocol that can be pretty time intensive at this part of the process.\u00a0 Failure to do certain things at the right moment can create problems that cannot be fixed later on.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There are potential risks to existing stocks from fire, smoke or heat.\u00a0 Some are preventable, some are not, but someone has to be there and able to do it.\u00a0 Clearly that will be a problem for a number of producers.\u00a0 Even if there aren\u2019t the \u2018specifics\u2019 we mentioned to negatively affect grapes or wine, lack of access on the part of winery crews has its own unique set of problems this time of year.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Taking it a step further, what if the winery goes altogether?\u00a0 You not only have what is being made, you have a bit of what was already made and still aging in barrel.\u00a0 So not only is the current \u2018crop\u2019 gone, so are portions of the last one or two vintages.\u00a0 At White Rock, one of the wineries rumored to be destroyed (their website tells a more positive story), they age their Cabernet in French oak for 20 months.\u00a0 So, the potential existed to lose three<\/em> vintages.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The final assessment isn\u2019t in for them.\u00a0 There are storage caves on the property which may have saved a lot of the stock.\u00a0 But White Rock serves as an example of what can happen.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t the first name you think of when Napa Valley is mentioned, even though they have been there for decades.\u00a0 It is a unique, small production property in Soda Canyon that has a very specific style.\u00a0 They have a carefully established network for sales and most folks that have been around Napa Valley for a while know who they are.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, let\u2019s say they did lose as many as three vintages of their red wines (hopefully not).\u00a0 They could buy something else and bottle it, but it wouldn\u2019t be the same thing that consumers have come to expect.\u00a0 They could be off the market for three years and have to start the distribution process all over again, no easy feat these days.\u00a0 If some of their 40-year-old vines were destroyed, it would take them, you guessed it, 40 years to get to them back to the same point.\u00a0 A lot of folks went through this kind of decision-making with phylloxera in the 90s, but that was a slow, predictable process not an overnight wipeout.\u00a0 You can\u2019t plan for this sort of thing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Finally, and again White Rock is just a real name that represents scores of wineries in every conceivable state of disarray from this terrible tragedy, what happens to such labels in the meantime?\u00a0 If you make tables, and one of your tables burns, you can make another one (yeah, we know that there\u2019s at least one guy out there mumbling no two pieces of wood are the same).\u00a0 You can\u2019t remake wine.\u00a0 Vintages, vine age, blends, etc., cannot be precisely reproduced.\u00a0 The competition in the marketplace is the fiercest we have seen in our decades of doing this, so coming to the market with less than your best is an uncomfortable proposition.\u00a0\u00a0 If you don\u2019t come to the market at all, that\u2019s bad for other reasons.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On top of it all, you\u2019ve got tourism.\u00a0 We are old enough to remember walking into a tasting room in the Napa Valley and seeing the owner behind the counter.\u00a0 Of course, that was the 70s.\u00a0 That was light years from where it is now.\u00a0 It is an industry unto itself.\u00a0 We read one article that said \u2018wine country\u2019 (however they defined it) had more visitors than Disneyland in the last year.\u00a0 How will all of this destruction and relocation affect that aspect?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is a nasty situation, lives lost, property lost, jobs lost, and more jobs lost by the people that support the people in the industry. \u00a0The whole industry will feel the sting of something of this magnitude in a number of different ways. \u00a0\u00a0It will take weeks to assess the obvious damages, but perhaps a decade or more to see the full, as yet unpredictable impact on the region.\u00a0 However, none of it matters until the winds die down and the fires subside, and that can\u2019t come soon enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Obviously, we need to start this by sending wishes and prayers to all of our friends in the wake of the fires in \u2018wine country\u2019.\u00a0 The loss of life is horrific and the extensive damage to property, still being assessed, is clearly catastrophic.\u00a0 Our heartfelt sorrows go out in particular to those who lost their … Continue reading “The Aftermath”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2245"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2250,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245\/revisions\/2250"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}