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Accepted Paper:
Tasting taint: wine, wildfires, and climate change
Gabriella Petrick
(Ruhr University Bochum)
As global temperatures have risen and wildfires become more common, the wine industry is trying to ways to salvage fire-fouled wine. I trace the history of wine taint and the efforts to mitigate its threat through science, technology, and agro-ecology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Paper long abstract:
As wildfires clouded the mid-day sun and turn a normally blue sky orange, wine makers in Napa Valley worried about wildfires ruining yet another vintage of their prestigious wines just as they were getting ready to harvest in August of 2021. It was not just the threat of wildfires cresting the mountains and burning vines that worried winemakers, but also the direction of the wind that could blow smoke into the vineyards and cause smoke taint in seemingly perfect grapes. Smoke taint makes wine taste like the ash from a cigarette or worse rendering the wine undrinkable. As global temperatures have risen and wildfires become more common not just in fire prone California, but in Australia, South Africa, Southern Europe and the usually damp Pacific Northwest, the wine industry is trying to ways to salvage fire-fouled wine. This paper traces the history of wine taint and the efforts of industry professionals and university researchers to mitigate its threat through science, technology, and agro-ecology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.