There was never a doubt in Ray Signorello, Jr.’s mind that he would rebuild.

Just three days after the 2017 Atlas Peak fire ripped through Napa’s Signorello Estate, burning the hospitality center and his residence to the ground, Signorello told his employees the winery wasn’t done. He rented temporary offices. He erected a trailer on the scorched Silverado Trail property for tastings. And on Tuesday, he will break ground on a new winery, fermentation building and caves.

“I’m looking at the positive side,” Signorello says. “Nobody got hurt. We didn’t lose any vines. And now we can take everything we’ve learned since we first built in 1984 and create something contemporary and sustainable.”

It has been one year since a series of firestorms ravaged Northern California’s wine country, killing 44 people, destroying 245,000 acres and 8,900 structures, including thousands of homes and businesses. Supported by their communities, three of the hardest hit wineries — Signorello Estate, Santa Rosa’s Paradise Ridge Winery and Mendocino’s Frey Vineyards in Redwood Valley — have begun rebuilding with a focus on both fireproofing and modern, concierge-style wine tasting experiences.

Signorello winemaker Pierre Birebent and his crew tried to fight the flames with a hose and water-soaked T-shirt, until the smoke overwhelmed them.

“I’m trying to forget, but people keep reminding me,” Birebent says, standing amid the rocks and rubble earlier this week. “I wasn’t afraid. I was just mad that I couldn’t do more.”

[One year later, what has happened to 18 wineries impacted by the Wine Country fires?]

But their efforts — they watered down everything before they fled, including the stainless steel tanks containing just-pressed estate cabernet sauvignon, which fetches $175 a bottle — saved the 2017 vintage, and they won’t have to replace the crush pad. They’ll move the tanks into a new 9,600-square-foot fermentation building, with 10,000 square feet of soon-to-be carved caves just behind.

Instead of a tasting bar, the new hospitality center will have private seating areas for appointment-only food and wine pairings. The 8,400-square-foot building, which includes an upstairs residence, will be constructed of steel, concrete and glass with roof and exterior sprinklers. The old building was an Italian villa made mostly of wood. The new materials will help cement Signorello’s vision for the future — and for his daughters, who are 5 and 7.

“We want it to stand the test of time,” he says.

Paradise Ridge Winery’s Rene Byck and his sister Sonia Byck-Barwick want their new property to look and feel like the original two-story stucco, but with fire-resistant materials and a tile deck upstairs. They’ve hosted 1,000 weddings over the last 24 years at the 155-acre ranch known for its iconic, two-story-tall LOVE sculpture. Miraculously, LOVE and the other cutting-edge sculptures were unscathed.

“When we re-open, we want it to have the feeling of coming home,” says Rene, who was flooded with emails after the fires from couples who had married there. “They said they started their lives together here. That it was a place they brought their families and friends. And that they see us as a pillar in the community. We had no idea people felt that way about us.”

Still, rebuilding was not an easy decision. The Tubbs Fire destroyed Paradise Ridge, wiping out three homes, the wine-making facility, tasting and events center and several barns. The winery was also under-insured — the family received $5.4 million for building losses, but their total losses exceeded $13 million — so the only option was to rebuild with cost-saving measures and a new business model.

With final permits nearly in place and construction set to begin in weeks, the plan is to re-open next October — two years to the day of the fire — in the same location, but with limited, outsourced staff and appointment-only tastings. There are no plans to re-build the winemaking facility, either. Paradise Ridge now makes its wines off-site, at Flanagan Vineyards in Healdsburg.

“We hit a lot of bumps this past year but we kept chugging along,” Sonia says. “One thing you learn after a disaster like this is that you’re stronger than you feel.”

Sonia recalls one moment in particular that had a profound effect on her. When the fires started, a friend she’s known since high school texted her, saying, “We just lost our home, but my daughters have your LOVE sign on their social media pages and it’s all that is keeping them going.”

OK, Sonia told herself, then we’re not going to let this take us down. “All the neighborhoods where we grew up had burned,” Sonia says. “Everything that was familiar and comforting was in ruins. But we decided to move forward, think of it as a rebirth as opposed to ruins.”

Every once in a while, there is a bright spot in the midst of tragedy. For Mendocino’s Frey Vineyards, it went something like this: One month before the Redwood Valley Complex Fire ripped through Mendocino County, reducing the winery’s bottling facility, offices and tasting room to ashes, owner Katrina Frey had secured her first permit to build a new winery two miles down the road. Demand for Frey’s organic and biodynamic wines had been rising for years, and the winery had outgrown its location on Tomki Road.

“It is truly our silver lining,” Frey says.

The new winery, a metal building with sprinklers and a crush pad made of recycled concrete, is slated to open in March. It will sit in the middle of a 32-acre vineyard, which should act as a barrier against future fires, Frey says. She believes that the family’s five-acre cabernet sauvignon vineyard along Tomki Road might very well have saved her 94-year-old mother-in-law’s house.

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A closer look at the wineries damaged by Wine Country fires Beba, her mother-in-law, escaped that night with her dog, daughter and brother, ending up in a Fort Bragg motel until the winds fueling the 36,523-acre fire suddenly changed direction. But not before it destroyed 14 of the 16 residences on the property.

Since then, real estate at Beba’s, also known as the Big House, has been precious. Family members who don’t snag a spot to rest their head after a long day’s work usually end up pitching a camper trailer somewhere on the scorched property. Frey says they hope to rebuild those homes, but it’s not a priority right now. There’s too much to do.

“For now, we’re ready to button down for the winter,” she says. “We just harvested chardonnay and pinot. Last week’s rains really invigorated the vines. And lessened the risk of another October fire.”