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For days, Bradley Brown was anxiously waiting to learn the fate of his property in Boulder Creek. After a mandatory evacuation was issued for the area on Tuesday, the winemaker was camping out in his RV at a friend’s house. Tracking fire maps, he could see that his home and his winery, Big Basin Vineyards, were directly in the line of the CZU August Lightning Complex fires.
Late Saturday night, Brown learned from a neighbor that his house was destroyed. Miraculously, the winery — and, along with it, his wine inventory — had survived.
He felt fortunate, but “there’s a lot of question marks right now,” said Brown, one of the top winemakers in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Had the wine inside the winery been damaged by heat and smoke? Were the grapevines scorched? With harvest approaching, would he be able to use the winery to make wine at all this year?
It’s a set of problems familiar to many winemakers across California right now, as they confront the loss of property — and the ongoing threat of further destruction — that accompanies the arrival of the harvest season.
With the fire now gone, it was a race against time to save what remained at Big Basin Vineyards. “The whole 2019 vintage is inside the winery,” Brown said. “We finished bottling 2,000 cases the day before the evacuation order.”
By Sunday, the power had been out for more than a week; wine can be ruined if exposed to heat for long periods. He hoped that the sealed doors had kept the temperature around 75 degrees, but he planned to drive to Napa to pick up a generator so that he could get the air conditioning running again.
Brown was certain that the grapes on the vine, the first of which would have been ready for harvesting this week, were lost to smoke damage, and he doesn’t have crop insurance.
As for the other vineyards throughout the Santa Cruz Mountains from which he buys fruit, the results could be more varied. He was hopeful that the Coastview Vineyard, in the Gabilan Mountains — the source of some beautiful Big Basin Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays — had been spared, but was waiting for tests to be run to assess the presence of smoke-taint compounds.
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“This year may be a huge bust for the Santa Cruz Mountains,” he said. And with the fires still burning, “we’re still not out of the woods yet.” Two other winemaker friends had already offered to let Brown use their facilities for winemaking if he’s unable to return to his.
Why had the fire obliterated his home, but not the nearby winery? That, Brown said, was a mystery. Before evacuating, he’d doused the sides of the winery with water, but he was sure that it had dried out by the time the fire came through on Friday. He’d moved his propane tanks away from the building, which may have helped. But that still didn’t explain why the stacks of wooden barrels directly outside the doors hadn’t caught fire.
“It’s eerie looking,” he said. “It’s really hard to say why the winery didn’t burn.”
Brown has owned this property, located next to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, since 1998. Its history as a winegrowing site stretches back to the late 1800s, when a group of French immigrants arrived and planted grapes. They sold the place around the time Prohibition was enacted, according to records that Brown has found. By the time he purchased the land, it had been mostly neglected for decades, and there were few remnants of the original vineyard. “Vines were crawling up into trees,” he said.
He set to work restoring the property, planting Syrah, Grenache, Pinot Noir, Roussanne and Viognier and, over time, establishing Big Basin Vineyards as one of the best wine producers in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Although Brown doesn’t have crop insurance, he said he does have a good insurance policy on his house, which was designed by architect Craig Henritzy. The loss hadn’t quite sunk in yet, Brown said, but he was optimistic. “I’ll be able to rebuild better, smarter, more sustainably,” he said.
In fact, despite the fact that the house was gone, there was a lasting memento of it: Musician Bill Nershi, of the band String Cheese Incident, had recorded his latest album with his wife Jillian Nershi inside Brown’s home in February. “The house is gone, but we have this incredible music to remember it by,” Brown said.
Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob
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August 24, 2020 at 03:38AM
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Top Santa Cruz Mountains winery survives fire, but owner’s home destroyed - San Francisco Chronicle
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