Esther Mobley Sep. 23, 2021 8:41 a.m.
As the Caldor Fire continues to pump smoke into California’s Sierra foothills, endangering yet another year’s worth of wine there, more farmers and winemakers are clamoring for government assistance.
This week, they got news that some help could be on the way, after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a disaster-relief package that would allocate $10 billion to compensate farmers who have lost crops due to natural disasters. The bill’s text explicitly pointed to smoke-tainted wine grapes as an example of such a crop loss.
It’s unclear what sort of chance the bill has in the Senate, since it’s tied to Democrats’ effort to increase the federal debt limit. Though the disaster-relief part has broad support, the debt-limit part is unpopular with the Senate’s Republicans, as my colleague Tal Kopan has reported.
What is clear, however, is that the severity of the smoke-taint issue has reached a level of national attention. This isn’t simply about some fancy Napa Cabernets having more-pronounced-than-usual notes of grilled ribeye. It’s about the very survival of a $40 billion statewide industry that employs 325,000 Californians, according to the Wine Institute, including about 6,000 farmers.
One of those farmers, Chuck Mansfield, is currently having something of an existential crisis as he takes stock of the damage that the Caldor Fire has inflicted on his crop this year.
Mansfield’s company, Goldbud Farms, manages 200 acres of wine grapes and 60 acres of other tree fruits, like nectarines and peaches, in El Dorado County. The vineyards he oversees, such as Fenaughty and Witters, are among the most distinguished in that region: Famous wineries including Arnot-Roberts, Edmunds St. John, Keplinger and Donkey & Goat buy fruit that he farms.
Mansfield has crop insurance, but his coverage doesn’t reflect his actual costs. His reimbursement is based on the average price that all farmers in El Dorado County receive for their wine grapes, but Mansfield’s grapes cost much more than the county average, largely because he spends more money on farming throughout the year, he says. “It might pay for the act of dropping the fruit on the ground,” he says, “and that’s about it.”
That’s following a devastating 2020 vintage, in which Donkey & Goat’s production was down by almost 35%, due mostly to wildfire smoke in Mendocino County. (El Dorado County grapes were generally unaffected last year.) …
Content retrieved from: https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/wine/article/Without-federal-aid-for-wildfires-California-s-16479942.php.