Smoky wines from West Coast wildfires: Oregon winemakers find flavor in the ashes.

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The 2020 vintage was on track to be the perfect year for the 874 wineries of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Cradled by the Cascade Mountains to the east and the coastal range to the west, weather conditions were near perfect and pinot noir vines were thriving—that is, until late summer, when the valley choked on smoke from record-breaking wildfires exacerbated by climate change. The grapes, sensitive and porous, soaked up everything in the air and soil, leading to a distinctly smoky smell and, occasionally, a bitter and acrid taste. As a result, many Willamette Valley winemakers left hundreds of tons of grapes to rot on the vine that season. The Oregon wine industry, the second-largest in the country after California, estimated as much as $1.5 billion in losses for the year.

But rot and losses are not the only things to emerge from the ashes. As climate change introduces an era in which smoky wildfire seasons in Oregon and beyond are the new normal, there’s a new wave of winemakers who are working with, rather than against, this new “smoke terroir.” Wildfire wines, which incorporate at least some smoky flavor into the final product, aren’t going away. With more than 1 million acres razed in major wine producing regions in California and beyond in the first half of 2025 alone and a particularly difficult wildfire season ahead, Oregon’s 2020 vintage can tell us a little something about how to adapt in the age of climate change.

“We can’t tell an honest story of Willamette Valley in 2020 without the smoke,” said Gabriel Jagle, head winemaker at Scenic Valley Farms.

That’s undoubtedly true, and the issue of wildfires and wine isn’t just confined to Oregon. One economic analysis found that the entire wine industry on the West Coast experienced $3.7 billion in losses in 2020. Small winemakers were especially affected. When one bad season can make or break a business, 2020 was a deeply destabilizing time.

“I remember releasing that 2021 vintage of pinot noir and just thinking to myself, If this wine isn’t good, I’m done. I’m done being a winemaker,” said Jagle.

For many winemakers, the wound is still fresh: Last March, dozens of Oregon wineries and vineyards sued regional utility company PacifiCorp for upward of $100 million following a jury decision that found the company liable for failing to take effective steps to prevent wildfires. Then, hot on their heels in September, three Willamette Valley vineyards sued two more regional utility companies for upward of $11 million, claiming that smoke and ash from the fire ruined their harvests.

The good news is that smoke-impacted grapes aren’t any more dangerous than a nice smoked lox bagel, but the 2020 vintage still raised a lot of questions. Following the statewide wildfires that year, a team of researchers at Oregon State University received a $7.65 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to explore smoke’s impact on wine. As part of their research, OSU scientists have honed in on the specific compounds that cause smoky or ashy flavor.

The truth is, from a scientific standpoint, there’s still a lot that we don’t understand about smoke’s effect on grapes. The first thing to know is that not all smoke effect is created equal. How thick or thin a grape’s skin is matters, as does how close it is to the fire itself. Think about being near a campfire: If you’re lingering around the edges of a campsite pitching your tent, you might not pick up the smell of smoke at all. If you’re toasting marshmallows, smoke might stay in your hair for days.

One thing we do know is that pinot noir, which accounts for about 70 percent of all grapes grown in Oregon, is especially affected, as are many red wines. This likely has to do with how it’s made. Smoke compounds appear to be stored largely in the grape’s skin, so when pinot noir grapes are crushed and fermented on those skins, all of those compounds seep into the juice.

So what can be done for winemakers who aren’t ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Some winemakers like Cyler Varnum, owner of Varnum Vintners, have been experimenting with more natural ways around this problem. His solution was deceptively simple: just don’t use the skins. With his 2020 red viognier, he fermented juice from his smoke-impacted Willamette Valley grapes on petite syrah skins from California, resulting in a wine that was rich and full bodied but not smoky.

It’s also possible to try to filter out these smoke compounds using high-intervention winemaking techniques, carbon, and other additives, but for many winemakers, that’s missing the point.

“I’d rather have smoky wine that smells like barbecue than a soulless, hollow, chemical-filled wine,” said Meredith Bell, owner of EST and Statera Cellars.

Bell isn’t the only one. With the rise of smoky mezcal and natural wine, appetites for unconventional flavors, in and out of the world of wine lovers, are higher than ever. While smoke-impacted wine is traditionally seen as a sin of conventional winemaking, new research from Oregon State University and New Zealand published this February indicates that the drinking public may be more adventurous. They found that consumers—particularly those who already like smoky flavors in their food—actually enjoyed smoke-impacted wines. After all, these are flavors that are essential to regional cuisine from southern barbecue to Nordic smoked fish to smoked cheeses in France.

To capture these smoke-loving consumers, Varnum uses commonly loved tasting notes. “In prior vintages here in the valley or in places where smoke is much less common, if you were to describe a wine as being smoky, it would actually be a positive thing—charcoal, graphite, smoke, toast, or even woodsy. These are nonfruit characters that people actually gravitate towards,” said Varnum.

While conventional wisdom might be to hide the smoke’s presence, researchers found that when the wine’s label acknowledged the smoky characteristic, everyone enjoyed the wine more because there was a story being told. In 2020, when smoke impacted Varnum’s German-style sparkling wine program, he decided to embrace those flavors.

“When we talk about traditional methods for sparkling wine, that sort of bread crust, toasty, brioche-y, creme brulee-y, burnt caramel thing is actually a quality that you want in Champagne,” he said. When he bottled his 2020 sparkling blanc de blancs, he named it Toast.

At the time, many winemakers used 2020 as a moment to experiment with new techniques. (Varnum remembers one veteran winemaker wielding a diary of his from the 1980s when a wildfire affected his Burgundy vineyard during a meeting of about 30 winemakers to compare notes on smoke. His solution? Add milk.)

When smoke and ash clouded Varnum’s east Willamette Valley vineyard growing pinot noir and chardonnay, he picked them the same day and pressed the grapes as quickly as possible to get them off their skins as soon as possible. Varnum eventually released his own series called Smoke & Mirrors: three different single vineyard wines—pinot gris rosé, pinot noir, and tempranillo—that all had varying degrees of smoke effect (Smoke), paired with three other 2020 wines made with a different technique or blended so smoke was not present at all (Mirrors). Or the three impacted wines could be bought together as A Pack of Smokes.

Bell took a similarly adaptive approach. Her vineyard, 10 minutes from Oregon City, was just one mile from an evacuation zone. She and the close family friends that help her farm the land were out in the vineyard that very day, picking what they could. As a small winemaker, one bad year could make or break her. Typically, the pinot noir from her Oregon City vineyard is pressed hard, then aged for a year and half, but in 2020, she opted for a gentle press to minimize contact with the skins and a brief in-bottle ferment to produce a frizzante rosé with notes of grapefruit, lilac, beeswax, and a hint of toasted marshmallow. The wine, in stores just two months after harvest, had a phoenix emblazoned on the label.

With her chardonnay, Bell eschewed filtration for another technique: aging the wine for a year on the lees from her 2019 vintage, free from smoke impact. She points to this, as well as thoughtful blends with previous vintages, as a way to avoid the structural gaps and lack of character created by aggressive filtration techniques.

For all the clever techniques and savvy storytelling, it’s not all roses. Gabriel Jagle jokes about his “plague wine,” but it’s still a sore subject: While his 2019 vintage sold out within 10 months, he had only sold about half of his 2020 vintage a year in. “There was a huge swath of the wine industry that didn’t want anything to do with these wines.” Some of his distributors refused to even taste it.

I had no such qualms. Jagle sent me two bottles of his 2020 pinot noir, barrel aged in French and Oregon oak for 10 months, another technique that subtly underscored the woody hues of the wine. I uncorked it with three friends—a bar owner, a bartender, and a chef—all swirling, sniffing, and sipping with a tinge of morbid curiosity.

We agreed there were whiffs of campfire on the nose and a big punch of fruit right off the bat on first taste. For me, there were no “ashtray” flavors to speak of; instead, I found a ripple of tannins, dates, and currant. If anything, I encountered a slight physical sensation in the after taste that felt somewhat smoky. This disconcerted my chef friend in particular, who compared it to missing a step going down the stairs. As a group, we agreed that it would pair well with hearty, earthy foods: grilled steak, roast beets and goat cheese, mushroom and shallot tart. Later on, another friend joined our table. None the wiser about the bottle or its context, she made no mention of smoke and helped us finish the bottle.

As someone who lived in Portland in 2020, I know how fraught that year was; few of us want to be reminded of it. I remember everyone’s respirators working overtime as protesters faced off with city police and the National Guard firing off tear gas into the already hazy air. Jagle recalls boiling oranges, cinnamon, and cloves on the stove just in the hopes of filling his home that he shares with his wife and children with a scent other than ash. It was an era when everything was changing, and change can be a bitter pill to swallow.

If wildfire wine is a reminder of a contentious present and an unknown future for some, for Cyler Varnum, it’s a connection to a shared past.

“If you think about smoke in its purest, most primal sense, it’s actually something that is inherently tied to humanity. Fire allows us to keep predators away. Smoke keeps insects away. We cook things. Our community, our life, in the really primal aspect of humanity is based around heat, fire, and safety. The sense memory that’s tied to smoke is a primally comforting thing.”

The Pacific Northwest is a region whose food culture is defined by a hyperlocal, hyperseasonal approach. We’re nature people and proud of it. Call me a hippie, but it’s hard for me to taste a bottle of wine that explores, rather than hides, the conditions it was made in and call it a defect.  At the end of the day, to me, the ways that local winemakers have evolved their practice to be responsive to the new cycles of our environment are, instead, a testament to the Pacific Northwest’s resilience.