It is necessary to allow your browser to share the location. It’s also possible to see a 7 DAY forecast and METEOGRAM for the same location. We would like to point out some of the new features: CURRENT LOCATION - presents weather information for the location where the user currently is. “It’s not something that we can withstand for the long term.Dear friends, We are very excited to present our new web site to you which was developed with a special focus on mobile devices and social networks. At the same time, his insurers cut by half the amount of coverage they were willing to provide. His winery now pays more than $1 million a year, up from $200,000 before the fire. It just costs five times as much as it did last year. Chappellet is one of the lucky ones - he still has insurance. The main building, which his parents built after buying the property in 1967, resembles a cathedral: gargantuan wooden beams soar upward, sheltering row after row of oak barrels aging a fortune’s worth of cabernet.Īfter the Glass Fire, Mr.
Chappellet Winery is the picture of commercial-scale efficiency, producing some 70,000 cases of wine a year. Chappellet stood amid the bustle of wine being bottled and trucks unloading. Hannigan said, “it’s not going to help us during this harvest season.” Half the Insurance, Five Times the Cost The California legislature is considering a bill that would allow wineries to get insurance through a state-run high-risk pool.īut even if that passes, Mr. Hannigan have been unable to find coverage from any other carrier. “We spent thousands and thousands of dollars upgrading the property,” Mr. This is his first season at Green & Red, which lost its entire crop of reds to smoke from the Glass Fire.Īfter that fire, the winery’s insurer wrote to the owners, Raymond Hannigan and Tobin Heminway, listing the changes needed to reduce its fire risk, including updating circuit breaker panels and adding fire extinguishers.
#Napa weather series
In 2017, he was an assistant winemaker at Mayacamas Vineyards, another Napa winery, when it was burned by a series of wildfires. Whitlatch is a veteran of the wine fires. Another tactic, even more costly, is to replant rows of vines so they’re parallel to the sun in the warmest part of the day, catching less of its heat.Īt 43, Mr. A more expensive option than sunscreen is to cover the vines with shade cloth, Mr. “We got torched.”Īs the days get hotter and the sun more dangerous in Napa, wine growers are trying to adjust. “The temperature of this cluster probably reached 120,” Mr. Some of the fruit had turned black and shrunken - becoming, effectively, absurdly high-cost raisins. He pointed to a bunch of grapes at the very top of the peak exposed to sun during the hottest hours of the day. The week before, temperatures had topped 100 degrees and staff sprayed the vines with sunscreen.
#Napa weather plus
For almost three decades, those vineyards - 14 acres of cabernet, seven acres each of chardonnay and riesling, plus a smattering of cabernet franc, merlot and petit verdot - were untouched by wildfires. He named his winery Smith-Madrone, after the orange-red hardwoods with waxy leaves that surround the vineyards he planted. In 1971, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, Mr. The drive requires some concentration: The 2020 Glass Fire incinerated the wooden posts that held up the guardrails, which now lie like discarded ribbons at the edge of the cliff. Stu Smith’s winery is at the end of a two-lane road that winds up the side of Spring Mountain, west of St. “All of us are out business.” ‘I don’t like the way the reds are tasting’ If the heat and drought trends worsen, “we’re probably out of business,” said Cyril Chappellet, president of Chappellet Winery, which has been operating for more than half a century. If there is any nook of American agriculture with both the means and incentive to outwit climate change, it is here.īut so far, the experience of winemakers here demonstrates the limits of adapting to a warming planet.
Napa boasts some of the country’s most expensive farmland, selling for as much as $1 million per acre a ton of grapes fetches two to four times as much as anywhere else in California. Their fate matters even for those who can’t tell a merlot from a malbec.
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