Egg white fining, of course, removes colloids (extremely fine particulate matter). Winemakers here: is everything our noses recognize as “smoke taint” actually particles that can be removed in this fashion? I’m skeptical.
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A good friend of mine bought every bottle of the 2008 Decoy Pinot Noir he could find for this very reason.
There are likely to be different qualities of smoke.
Down South, we get all sorts of quarrels about the best wood for smoking pork barbeque, although The Master only used hickory, primarily for the quality of its coals [rather than for its smoke].
I would guess that when a wildfire alights a creosote-soaked wooden utility pole and melts [or blows up?] a transformer, you’d get an entirely different quality of smoke than if the wildfire had torched a cedar tree, or an eucalyptus tree.
And if something like a diesel truck or a diesel tractor got torched, then I should think you’d get nastiness on the order of a melting/exploding transformer.
When I was a kid, there was even a persistent belief that you could get a terrible internal reaction in your lungs if you breathed the smoke of burning poison ivy or burning poison oak.
Fortunately, I’ve never yet had a chance to test that hypothesis, and I hope never will.
Reading this thread I did not even realize the R-M offer included any pinot. I had to go back and look as I skipped it thinking it was all Chard. I must believe that they did not think there was any taint to Anderson Valley fruit - that is assuming the one taster is correct. No way they would stake their reputation on this. This will definitely be a trying vintage.
For what it’s worth Littorai also released Anderson Valley vineyard designates. Not sure if that counts as consensus, but seems like Anderson Valley was ok
The fire was not in Anderson Valley, it was in Napa County. Even then the smoke drifted South and West not North.
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Wow, blast from the past right there with Rick Gregory.
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Without looking back I’m pretty sure I said over a year ago that Anderson Valley would be one of the least affected wine regions in 2020.
Well. I go back and forth on this topic. On one hand, I like to put trust in good producers. But when I get offerings from good producers I want them to address the issue directly and say what they did. I think that’s only fair. I will definitely cut my total purchase and probably only buy from folks that I have a long history with or get to taste.
Drank a 2020 RM Bearwallow pinot. It was fine. Didn’t smell or taste (insert version of word “smoke” here).
I’m not worried about these wines having issues now, I’m worried about them in 10 + years. It will come out with time. Corked wines are the same.
I miss Rick.
FYI
The Anderson Valley text is over clouds not smoke.
The hand drawn lines remind me of this map:
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Casey, most of the people I talked to were not making Pinot due to smoke aloft that settled into the valley in the second week of September (correct the timing if it’s wrong). Assume you had most of the whites picked by then. Was Day Ranch unaffected?
A quick look at the time stamp on photos shows September 9 was when we had our first smoke. We picked lots of stuff the following weeks and all of the lots passed lab analysis by our clients. The AQI levels in AV were some of the lowest on the north coast.
If anyone remembers 2008 in Northern California, it was the fire and ice vintage. I attended a tasting of Pinot Noir from that year and there was one producer who apparently picked after the fires and decided to produce a wine anyway. It tasted like an ashtray and clearly influenced my impression of the producer going forward.
Almost a month since your report on the first bottle. A lot of us probably have some of this wine and would like to confirm or deny your findings, but we don’t know which winery and bottling it is.