COVER STORY
THE HEAT IS ON: California Wines in 2020
A row of heat-destroyed chardonnay at the Four Gates Winery, “From a distance it looks like I have a vineyard full of grapes, except that there are no leaves and the clusters are not of grapes. They are clusters of dried up things,” said Winemaker/Proprietor Benyamin Cantz. (Credit: Joshua Rynderman)
By Gamliel Kronemer
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020 was quite a year in California: record heat and fires, COVID-19 and stay-at-home orders. For those in California’s $40-billion wine industry, it was a year like no other. The Jewish Link reached out to a number of California’s kosher winemakers and winery proprietors to learn about the challenges they faced and to find out how they fared. “It was like we all had these signs on our backs that read, ‘Kick me and kick me again’,” explained Ernie
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Weir of Hagafen Cellars, California’s oldest kosher winery. “We had a triple whammy, with low rainfall and a very strong desiccating heatwave in the beginning of August that dehydrated grapes abnormally. Then we had the first wildfire—and so much smoke that we didn’t see the sun for two or three days. Then we had the second fire, which led to more smoke and the non-harvest or provisional harvest of grapes.” And all of that is before considering the impact of COVID-19 on the industry.
MARCH 2021 / NISAN 5781
In fact, California had a recordsetting year of nearly 10,000 incidents of wildfires that burned in excess of 4 million acres of land (almost 4% of the entire state). While some vineyards burned up entirely, a significant percentage of those that didn’t burn were affected by what winemakers refer to as “smoke taint”—particles of ash coating the grapes and imparting an acrid, smoky flavor. “The problem with smoke taint is that you don’t get a nice smoky flavor like in a smoky
