According to Mike Zolnikov, who tends a couple of acres of Pinot Noir and an acre of Chardonnay on a flat, slightly soggy patch of the central Willamette Valley, in Oregon, it had been a once-in-a-decade growing season. “Not too hot, not too wet,” he recalled, wistfully. “It would have been a really great year.” A few hundred miles south, in California’s Napa Valley, the winemaker Ashley Egelhoff, of Honig Vineyard and Winery, was feeling similarly about her Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc. “That’s how 2020 was panning out: like Goldilocks, just right,” she told me.

For wine growers and makers, each season offers a series of fresh yet familiar opportunities for disaster. Drought shrivels the grapes; excessive heat deprives the juice of acidity; too much rain results in rampant mold. “But that’s the fun of it,” Egelhoff said. “Every harvest brings a surprise.” The gamble of spraying early or of picking the grapes late, the black magic of fermentation, the art of blending: it’s precisely the puzzle of chance and choice that keeps winemakers hooked. Plus, every now and then, as in 2020, you get perfect conditions. “Then everything went to hell,” Egelhoff said.

That August, the West Coast’s worst fire season in history began. More than eleven thousand bolts of lightning struck central and Northern California in the span of thirty-six hours, heralding the start of an orange-skied autumn in which flights were suspended, more than eight million acres burned across twelve states, and winemakers’ dreams of a perfect vintage went up in flames. “The lightning storm came over on the first day we were bringing Sauvignon Blanc in, and within a couple of hours there was smoke,” Egelhoff told me. “I was on the crush pad—we were unloading our first truck of fruit—and it was probably one of the most heartbreaking moments of my career.”

In the past few decades, as wildfires have become larger, faster, and more severe because of climate change, the focus has been on the considerable damage caused by the flames themselves; the smoke has been thought to be relatively harmless. Only recently have scientists realized that the opposite is true. In humans, smoke inhalation has been linked to heart and lung damage and to multiple forms of cancer; this year researchers in Europe concluded that they had underestimated death tolls from short-term wildfire-smoke exposure by ninety-three per cent. In the United States, smoke exposure is estimated to have caused tens of thousands of deaths every year between 2010 and 2020—an order of magnitude more than the number of lives lost to the actual fires.

Plants don’t have lungs, of course, but grapevines do breathe, absorbing oxygen and other atmospheric gases—including smoke—through small pores on the underside of their leaves, or by diffusion across the fruit’s thin, waxy skin. The result is smoke taint, a flaw in wine that has been described as tasting “like Las Vegas smells,” like “burnt salami served on an ashtray,” and, perhaps most evocatively, like the morning after a big night out, when “you’ve smoked a bunch of cigarettes and then you wake up, smell your hands, and regret your entire life.”

Although many wine drinkers have remained blissfully ignorant of this addition to wildfires’ already heavy toll, it has been disastrous for winemakers. One analyst concluded that the 2020 wildfires cost the California wine industry nearly four billion dollars, an amount that includes both direct fire damage and sales lost owing to smoke exposure. “We had brought in just twenty tons of Sauvignon Blanc, and we had to assume that everything else was ruined,” Egelhoff said. “It was a lost vintage.” The hundreds of thousands of tons of California grapes left unharvested that year were estimated to be worth more than six hundred million dollars alone. Oregon suffered similarly. “For a couple of days, it was a red sky, and then there was no sky,” Zolnikov said. “It was just solid smoke.” He painstakingly cleaned all the ash off his vines before harvest, but when winemakers shared the bottles they’d made with his grapes they still tasted acrid and smoky.

Clearly, the best way to prevent smoke taint would be to prevent wildfires in the first place. In the meantime, the wine industry is desperate to protect its grapes. As 2020 drew to a close, a trio of West Coast researchers—Tom Collins, at Washington State University; Elizabeth Tomasino, at Oregon State University; and Anita Oberholster, at the University of California, Davis—proposed an ambitious, “smoke to glass” effort aimed at finding an answer. “That year made it very clear we need to be better prepared,” Tomasino told me. The U.S.D.A., which normally has a puritanical reluctance to fund research that might be used by the beer, wine, and spirits industry, awarded the team $7.65 million in 2021. “As devastating as 2020 was, that’s the silver lining,” Egelhoff, who recalled sending the trio “a very angry e-mail” that year, complaining about a lack of help from researchers, said. “It really pushed them to get the solutions we need.”

In September, I joined Collins and a group of students on a trip to Washington State University’s experimental vineyards, in the Yakima Valley. It was early morning, and two sunrises lit the horizon. The false dawn, to the north, was a wildfire: overnight, a lightning strike had ignited the desiccated grasses of Rattlesnake Ridge, casting the hills around us into ominous relief. It was a stark reminder of the reason we’d woken up at this hour. Before the morning was over, we would simulate a rangeland fire of our own, to study the impact of smoke on wine grapes.

Collins runs the most impressive smoke-taint experiments in the country. Whereas Tomasino’s team, in Oregon, works with a handful of vines at a time, Collins smokes the equivalent of a quarter-acre vineyard in large hoop houses, allowing him to get closer to real-world conditions—and to make a decent amount of truly terrible wine. (Sadly, Oberholster died, from cancer, last year.) Each house encloses two hundred Merlot vines, and once we arrived we began pulling shade cloths over them, to the accompaniment of a portable speaker pumping out Fleetwood Mac. Three of the houses were to remain smoke-free, as an experimental control. In three others, we used zip ties to hang fat swags of vented plastic hosing along each row of vines, directly under the clusters of purple grapes.

Cartoon by Zachary Kanin

The students and I wrangled tarps and zip ties while Collins, who volunteers with the Boy Scouts, issued instructions leavened with gentle ribbing and reminders to hydrate. He fussed with the hoses, hooking them up to three battered grills. The light turned salmon, then golden, as we worked. Collins told the students to gather a few clusters and leaves for a pre-smoke sampling but to avoid vines with pink or orange tags, as these had been treated with an experimental barrier spray. Finally, with the samples stashed safely in an ice chest, Collins opened the grills, blowtorched some pellets inside, and watched as the smoke got going. I poked my nose through a slit in one of the houses as it filled with a pungent haze: the pellets were handcrafted from more than a dozen local rangeland species, including sagebrush, cheatgrass, and tumble mustard, all painstakingly collected by summer interns.

Although fire has been mankind’s constant companion and wine likely predates most agriculture, smoke-tainted wine seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. “People weren’t really aware of it, but it probably had been happening,” Mango Parker, a senior research scientist at the Australian Wine Research Institute, told me. She pointed me to a reference in an Italian enological textbook from 1892, which lists “smoky taste” as a potential flaw in wine—fortunately “found more rarely in Italian wines than in German.”