The entire 2020 crop has been lost in some parts of Hunter Valley and Adelaide Hills wine regions, while many growers are picking only a fraction of their fruit

It was late October when Adrian Sparks caught sight of the first smoke rising from the hilly horizon. Within days the haze evolved into drift smoke, which grew thicker as the mountain behind the Mount Pleasant winery in the Hunter Valley caught fire.

“It was full on,” Adrian says. “There was smoke all through November and December. A clear day would still be hazy. At its worst, some days our eyes would sting. We’d be coughing. You’d have to stay inside with the doors shut and the air conditioning going. It was like an apocalypse..”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bushfire smoke surrounds Mount Pleasant winery. Photograph: Adrian Sparks

Though the winery suffered no fire damage, the blanket of smoke that was its legacy has caused nightmares for it and the broader Hunter Valley wine industry, thanks to what is known as “smoke taint”.

Within the Hunter at least, the taint is forcing growers to confront the possibility that an entire year’s harvest will be dumped, with some vineyards choosing not to produce a 2020 vintage at all.

The phenomenon occurs when smoke binds to the skin of grapes, ruining the taste of wine made from the fruit. For an industry where perception equals success, the reputational damage caused by selling a vintage affected by smoke taint can be lethal.

Sparks had seen the effects of smoke on wine grapes before. Years earlier he encountered the problem while working as a winemaker in the Yarra Valley, around the time of the Black Saturday bushfires.

“It wasn’t as bad in 2009,” he says. “This is first time ever I’ve seen a company pull the pin on a vintage. I’ve been with the company for 20-odd years and I’ve never pulled the pin on an entire vintage.”

On 14 January the winery that ordinarily produces 30,000 cases of wine in a year decided it wouldn’t take the risk and scrapped its 2020 vintage entirely.

Mount Pleasant wasn’t alone. While vineyards further away from the fires escaped the worst, among the first to speak publicly about the issue was Bruce Tyrrell.

Tyrrell’s Wines – the family have operated in the Hunter Valley since 1858 – ordinarily harvests 1,200 tonnes of grapes but this year lost 80% of its crop.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Hunter on fire in October. Photograph: Stewart Ewan

“We didn’t have any immediate fire, we just had the smoke hanging around,” Tyrrell says. “We made the decision early, we weren’t going to take the risk with the brand. If a sommelier at a restaurant in New York opens a bottle of ours in 2030 and that wine has smoke taint, I’ve lost a whole lot of work.

“We’ve worked too long, too hard to build the reputation to get where we are to let it go in five minutes. We’ve been here for 160 years and I’d like to see the family here in another 160 years.”

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Brokenwood Wines, Meerea Park Wines and Davis Wine Group have all made the similar difficult decisions about their harvests with some being left unpicked.

Christina Tulloch, the chief executive of Tulloch Wines and president of the Hunter Valley Wine and Tourism Association, says the full economic cost is yet to be known. The community is already hurting after the bushfires cost it $42m in lost tourism.

“That’s the economic loss based purely on visitation – people visiting cellar doors,” she says. “It is still too early to put a figure on the loss in production as we would normally be in the middle of vintage. We are hearing reports of between 50 to 90% of crop loss due to smoke taint.

“Overall, we’re saying the loss will be more likely to be around 80 to 90% in reduction of tonnage that is brought into wineries in the 2020 year.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The southern and eastern wine regions affected by Australia’s bushfires. Photograph: Wine Australia

A similar story is playing out elsewhere. When bushfires tore through the Adelaide Hills before Christmas, a third of the wine-producing region was hit hard, as were grape growers on Kangaroo Island off the coast. Those who weren’t directly affected by the fires themselves watched the smoke linger over their fruit.

Anita Poddar, of Wine Australia, still says she is hopeful the worst may be avoided. Out of 64 wine-producing regions which make up the $6.25bn industry, just 1% have been affected by the fires. With authorities still assessing the direct and indirect damage, there is a chance some regions may escape unharmed.

“At this stage it is still too early to tell what the exact situation is,” Poddar says.

“We started doing research on smoke taint in 2003. What happens is when there’s fresh, heavy smoke, it lands on the outside of the grape, and specific compounds get into the skin, not the flesh. It’s a one-season thing – next season the vines are fine.”

With most winemakers now focused on the short-term work of getting through the year, few are asking whether this might represent a new normal.

Alisdair Tulloch, of Keith Tulloch Wine, says the threat posed by bushfires and smoke taint are indicative of a larger problem.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smoke rises from burnt land at Woodside in the Adelaide Hills in December. Photograph: Kelly Barnes/EPA

“You need to pull the camera back further than the bushfires themselves and the way they are influenced by climate change to look at the broader picture of grape growing in general,” he says. “Grape growing has been showing the fingerprints of climate change since the 1980s when the harvesting dates began to move forward.

“Last year was both the hottest and driest year on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, which confirms that this drought is anything but normal.”

Like chocolate and coffee crops elsewhere, wine grapes the world over require specific microclimates, while growers need predictable weather to make production decisions.

Thanks to the climate emergency this is changing right across the globe.

Within Australia, seasons are arriving earlier and weather has grown unpredictable. Rain falls in large quantities or not at all, while drier conditions are making it harder to grow certain varieties.

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These effects were predicted in a landmark study on the impact of climate change on the Australian wine industry published in 2011. A team at Australia’s scientific research agency CSIRO forecast temperatures would rise between 0.3C and 1.7C by 2030. Events have since borne out the predictions, with shorter winters and earlier harvests as fruit ripens earlier.

All of which has underscored the need to act, according to Alisdair Tulloch, who says problems affecting viticulture are true for all agricultural sectors.

“Our small family vineyard has been carbon neutral since 2017,” Tulloch says. “We’ve been certified as carbon neutral by the Australian government since March 2019.

“Meanwhile, other industries are free to pollute and pump as much of these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, while agriculture and the wine industry is picking up the bill.

“If we can do it, why can’t they?”



