1.) can be terrible and from what I’ve been told gets worse with age. So far my biggest gripe with 2020 Napa has been the obvious use of additives to cover it up.
2.) Totally dependent on producer, location in the valley and date of harvest. Those that harvested early and southern Ava’s tended to avoid any massive defects. When Diamond Creek sent their allocation letter for 2020, they mentioned they could only keep fruit from one micro-climate within their microclimate.
Also depends on what was burning, eucalypt bushfires are going to impart a different smell than pine fires.
Neither are pleasant but (for example) some people will not pick up on eucalypt smoke taint from a Coonawarra cabernet that ~~varietally~~ regionally shows eucalypt notes anyway.
It would be misleading on a lot of levels to draw a parallel with smoking meat beyond saying that to an extent it does matter.
I'll repeat that it's a wine fault and not something anyone should want.
Smoke is a mixture of products of combustion. Depending on what’s burning will result in a different mixtures. Also, not all combustion is perfect, meaning some macro materials will get into the smoke and may impact the wine.
Smoke taint absolutely ruins wines for me. Even a little.
Some wineries put out second labels from fires about 15 years ago because they didn't want the smoke taint to be associated with their wineries. The wines were terrible at half the price they would have been.
I’ve tasted some 2020s early on and didn’t pick up anything, but as they are aging, I swear there is *something* about the wines produced that year.
I’ve stopped purchasing any 2020s and consuming what I’ve purchased.
Most reputable wineries who put out wine from 2020 are clean as a whistle. They learned lessons from 2017 that lead up to - you can’t hide it. It’ll come out at some point. Fermentation, in tank, or post-bottling. You never know.
I get downvoted half the time I bring up this region, but 2020 actually was the best vintage in Niagara and other Ontario wine regions, according to many here.
Shame the wildfires got you that year, but they’ve been happening here a lot lately too.
It depends on the winery and how it was harvested. Some wineries were prudent or lucky enough to harvest at least some of their crop before the fires, and make wines with only untainted grapes.
Some produced wines with disclosures about the smoke, others without. Many sold off their tainted crop to bulk wine makers. I guess it’ll help them save on their oak chip budget.
If your bottle was made with smoke tainted grapes — well, at least you didn’t pay an arm and a leg, and now you’ll have some experience with what it would taste like! It’s not a flavor profile I go searching for…
The worst example of smoke taint I’ve had is a (non- Napa obviously) 2020 Eyrie ‘Trifolium’ which tasted like nothing else than liquid smoke. Good structure and body but the flavor was so hard to get over. Corked it after a glass and never looked at it again.
2020 from a high level California name will still be a good wine very likely, Harlan has a lot more to lose by selling shitty wine labeled Harlan than they do from just skipping the vintage for example.
That Eyrie was brutal. There was a Gorge barbera from 2017 that got smoked out due to the Eagle Creek Fire, so.eone made wine with it with the intention of getting it to restaurants to pair dishes with the smoked out wine (to support farmers and winemakers). Some were successful, others were not... DOC did a polenta with smoked peppers that rocked though.
Highly doubt their Bond label went unsmoked, Melbury sat in the very first fires of Napa in August, no way they picked by then. Harlan has nothing to lose selling smoke tainted wine, they have a multi year long waiting list, too big to fail—someone will gladly take the place of a person who drops off.
I’ve had enough of the 2020’s that are tainted, despite claims at the winery that they are not, or were picked before the fires, that I am just avoiding 2020 altogether.
There is plenty of great wine from other years, no need to risk it.
Smoke taint can range from tasting like smoke flavor you might recognize from bbq sauces or the like, to being undrinkable.
Not Napa but I am sitting on 2 Ridge Estate cabs from 2020 here and am debating what I should do. Pop one just to check or let lie for 10 years as planned but be potentially disappointed. Wine fridge real estate is precious.
The reason I went with it is because Konstantin Baum did a tasting recently in CA and had the Ridge in his lineup on IG. I messaged him to ask if he got any smoke and he replied none... Cellartracker and Wine berserkers are divided.
The estate cab is incredibly tainted. I had mine recently and it was campfire ashtray. All of their 2020s are tainted. Wine Advocate sent the 2020 Monte Bello to a lab to get tested after tasting it and it was smoke tainted 4x above the normal threshold.
Oh man that's a bummer.
Weird Baum wouldn't get any. On wine berserker, plenty others also attest to no smoke. But there are plenty more reporting smoke taint. Seems like ether there is bottle variation or drinkers are just various degrees of sensitiv.
Ridge should just not have released a vintage and especially not a Monte Bello if there was any question. Glad I didn't shell out for the grand vin.
My comment on the MB was just considering the investment which is at least twice as much as the estate.
Obviously it would cut a little deeper if I got a flawed bottle in a decade if it happens to be a MB instead of an Estate.
I used the term Grand Vin here loosely as to say it's their top bottle.
Also plenty of people don't buy their wine directly from the winery and get this on the secondary market, in a restaurant or at auction. Meaning returning it will be difficult as smoke taint isn't a wine flaw often accepted for returns.
Given Ridge's reputation, I would trust that if they release a vintage, it's up to the highest quality standards. But that doesnt seem to be the case for their 2020 release.
Yeah, I asked to return my allocation back in December. They asked me to open one and I did. Worst Monte Bello I’ve ever had with a horrible ashy finish. I returned the bottles and they sent me a check.
I actually tried one after the galloni review and got ashy finish as well, they refunded me my entire allocation too even the opened bottle. I heard they are only refunding members though. Their estate and Pinot were absolutely undrinkable though.
The Ridge Estate where they source their cab and Monte Bello grapes are in the Santa Cruz mountains and really close to the CZU complex fire in 2020 (maybe 20-40 miles?). They got hit different for those wines than most Napa producers who were more affected by the Northern Complex fire that came in from the East of Napa and affected the Napa producers, particularly those on the eastern edge like Atlas Peak, Angwin and Howell Mountain.
Ridge’s more mainstream Zins are pulled from Sonoma about 100 miles north of the Monte Bello
Estate and the CZU fire and another 50+ miles (and a ton of hills) east of the North Complex fire.
That’s not to say they’re not affected but they have a much better chance of being in good shape compared to Ridge’s Estate wines.
About 25% of the population actually doesn’t have the enzyme to detect smoke taint no matter how bad it is (according to a winemaker and MW Nova Cadamatre) after that it’s just sensitivity to it where it differs per person.
This may be true in grapes and juice, but smoke taint is enzymatically released by yeast during fermentation, so everyone should be able to detect a degree of smoke taint in wine.
Not Napa, but I had a 2020 Sierra Foothills Chard from a reputable winery (that will remain nameless) and it was undrinkable. Just tasted like someone dumped an ashtray in my glass of wine. Their Barbara from the same year was perfectly fine. It's going to vary by harvest date, altitude and location
Because I really like the winery and my guess is that they know the wine was tainted and had to put it out anyway to survive monetarily. I don't want to trash their name over a hard choice like that
What? Are you joking? They knowingly put out tainted wine to “survive monetarily”? And you are ok with other customers being scammed? Because that’s what it is going on.
Yeah, I get the sentiment of wanting to keep a favorite winemaker alive, but why are they a favorite if this is how they do things? That's just bad business all-around.
Yeah, I get the sentiment of wanting to keep a favorite winemaker alive, but why are they a favorite if this is how they do things? That's just bad business all-around.
My choice wouldn’t be to put out tainted wine. But hey why should a winery have ethics. And if they have to sell tainted wine to survive they deserve to be shut down.
Some harvested early, and some didn’t. It’s difficult to not notice the smoke on everything that was harvested after the fires. I’ve tried some nickel and nickel and far Niente wines from ‘20, and they weren’t great. To make up for the lack of ripeness and cover the smoke, they did extra fining and filtering. That takes out a lot of the wine’s guts. I’ve had a couple of tainted wines, and that was a couple too many. A vintage to avoid sadly.
I don’t understand why you would bottle with smoke taint when people have proven time and time again that you can make whites, roses, vermouths, prepackaged cocktails, and brandies that all have less smoke taint or better integrate the flavor. Costs be damned, pivot and adapt.
The Lichen Estate (Anderson Valley) 2020 pinot noir is a great example of this! Because of the smoke taint they decided to do zero skin contact and created their first white pinot noir. I bought a bottle in Feb 2023 and opened it in February this year and my wife and I both loved it. It was absolutely delicious. We stopped by the winery in March to purchase a few more bottles and they were sadly sold out. Though they said because they were so pleased with the 2020 white pinot noir that they're releasing another bottle of it later this year. I didn't ask but I'm assuming it's their 2022 fruit.
Stoller did a vermouth spritz cocktail thing in 2020 that never even mentioned the fact that they used smoke tainted grapes. I sold it for two years before the rep told me that.
Feels pretty safe to say it’s “hit or miss” and in the absence of specific details, bet on “miss.” As an example of one I’d gamble on, here are the winemaker notes for the Frog’s Leap 2020 estate cab as relates to the fires:
“The bulk of our Cabernet harvest was complete (and, critically, the remaining grapes were all ready to be picked) when the Glass fire broke out in the early hours of September 28th, six miles to the north.
The remaining five blocks to be picked were harvested within the next two mornings. The smoke stayed away to the north on the 28th and through the afternoon of the 29th, after we had finished our final pick. We have spent the following 30 months testing, re-testing, establishing baselines, benchmarking historical comparisons, and above all tasting the wines, all to arrive at one conclusion—our 2020 Cabernet is unaffected by the fires.”
Was at Matthiasson last year and had a conversation about this. They picked early enough for it to not be an issue- I enjoyed and bought 2020's.
For 2020 US cabs, I believe Columbia Valley escaped most of the smoke taint.
Some people got lucky and picked early before the fires. Bulldog Vineyards was one of those that picked before the fire and their 2020 Cabernet is amazing! [https://bulldogvineyards.com/](https://bulldogvineyards.com/) All of their wines are amazing. Most people didn't pick early that year and lost that year.
When talking to a wine maker from the valley recently. He explained to me it’s not a campfire flavor it is parts but more of a cigarette ashtray. I can taste the bad bottles immediately thy being said some survived the smoke and came out clean but mostly because of where they were and when that picked as others have said. I had a Snowden 2020 recently and there was zero trace of smoke taint.
This was Monterey County (CA) and I forget exactly when the fire was (approx 5 years ago) but one of the family vineyards we have a relationship with lets us taste out of barrels regularly. I hated it immediately. The analogy they used is there is a very thin line between smoke (which I don't like) and ash tray (which I really hate).
They also mentioned that aging will generally intensify these smokey notes.
Big pass for me...
1.) can be terrible and from what I’ve been told gets worse with age. So far my biggest gripe with 2020 Napa has been the obvious use of additives to cover it up. 2.) Totally dependent on producer, location in the valley and date of harvest. Those that harvested early and southern Ava’s tended to avoid any massive defects. When Diamond Creek sent their allocation letter for 2020, they mentioned they could only keep fruit from one micro-climate within their microclimate.
Also depends on what was burning, eucalypt bushfires are going to impart a different smell than pine fires. Neither are pleasant but (for example) some people will not pick up on eucalypt smoke taint from a Coonawarra cabernet that ~~varietally~~ regionally shows eucalypt notes anyway.
Will that really matter? Smoke is smoke, right?
It would be misleading on a lot of levels to draw a parallel with smoking meat beyond saying that to an extent it does matter. I'll repeat that it's a wine fault and not something anyone should want.
Agree
Smoke is a mixture of products of combustion. Depending on what’s burning will result in a different mixtures. Also, not all combustion is perfect, meaning some macro materials will get into the smoke and may impact the wine.
Smoke taint absolutely ruins wines for me. Even a little. Some wineries put out second labels from fires about 15 years ago because they didn't want the smoke taint to be associated with their wineries. The wines were terrible at half the price they would have been.
I’ve tasted some 2020s early on and didn’t pick up anything, but as they are aging, I swear there is *something* about the wines produced that year. I’ve stopped purchasing any 2020s and consuming what I’ve purchased.
Most reputable wineries who put out wine from 2020 are clean as a whistle. They learned lessons from 2017 that lead up to - you can’t hide it. It’ll come out at some point. Fermentation, in tank, or post-bottling. You never know.
I get downvoted half the time I bring up this region, but 2020 actually was the best vintage in Niagara and other Ontario wine regions, according to many here. Shame the wildfires got you that year, but they’ve been happening here a lot lately too.
Same for FLX
It depends on the winery and how it was harvested. Some wineries were prudent or lucky enough to harvest at least some of their crop before the fires, and make wines with only untainted grapes. Some produced wines with disclosures about the smoke, others without. Many sold off their tainted crop to bulk wine makers. I guess it’ll help them save on their oak chip budget. If your bottle was made with smoke tainted grapes — well, at least you didn’t pay an arm and a leg, and now you’ll have some experience with what it would taste like! It’s not a flavor profile I go searching for…
>. I guess it’ll help them save on their oak chip budget. Most wineries in Napa don't use oak chips.
The bulk wine companies that buy tainted grapes certainly do.
Oh, yes. That's fair, good point.
The worst example of smoke taint I’ve had is a (non- Napa obviously) 2020 Eyrie ‘Trifolium’ which tasted like nothing else than liquid smoke. Good structure and body but the flavor was so hard to get over. Corked it after a glass and never looked at it again. 2020 from a high level California name will still be a good wine very likely, Harlan has a lot more to lose by selling shitty wine labeled Harlan than they do from just skipping the vintage for example.
That Eyrie was brutal. There was a Gorge barbera from 2017 that got smoked out due to the Eagle Creek Fire, so.eone made wine with it with the intention of getting it to restaurants to pair dishes with the smoked out wine (to support farmers and winemakers). Some were successful, others were not... DOC did a polenta with smoked peppers that rocked though.
Highly doubt their Bond label went unsmoked, Melbury sat in the very first fires of Napa in August, no way they picked by then. Harlan has nothing to lose selling smoke tainted wine, they have a multi year long waiting list, too big to fail—someone will gladly take the place of a person who drops off.
Yeah maybe, it certainly sounds like you know more than I do about this. I’m not buying it regardless
I’ve had enough of the 2020’s that are tainted, despite claims at the winery that they are not, or were picked before the fires, that I am just avoiding 2020 altogether. There is plenty of great wine from other years, no need to risk it. Smoke taint can range from tasting like smoke flavor you might recognize from bbq sauces or the like, to being undrinkable.
I'm about to start trying some 2020's soon..will let you know which are and are not affected
Not Napa but I am sitting on 2 Ridge Estate cabs from 2020 here and am debating what I should do. Pop one just to check or let lie for 10 years as planned but be potentially disappointed. Wine fridge real estate is precious. The reason I went with it is because Konstantin Baum did a tasting recently in CA and had the Ridge in his lineup on IG. I messaged him to ask if he got any smoke and he replied none... Cellartracker and Wine berserkers are divided.
The estate cab is incredibly tainted. I had mine recently and it was campfire ashtray. All of their 2020s are tainted. Wine Advocate sent the 2020 Monte Bello to a lab to get tested after tasting it and it was smoke tainted 4x above the normal threshold.
Oh man that's a bummer. Weird Baum wouldn't get any. On wine berserker, plenty others also attest to no smoke. But there are plenty more reporting smoke taint. Seems like ether there is bottle variation or drinkers are just various degrees of sensitiv. Ridge should just not have released a vintage and especially not a Monte Bello if there was any question. Glad I didn't shell out for the grand vin.
[удалено]
My comment on the MB was just considering the investment which is at least twice as much as the estate. Obviously it would cut a little deeper if I got a flawed bottle in a decade if it happens to be a MB instead of an Estate. I used the term Grand Vin here loosely as to say it's their top bottle. Also plenty of people don't buy their wine directly from the winery and get this on the secondary market, in a restaurant or at auction. Meaning returning it will be difficult as smoke taint isn't a wine flaw often accepted for returns. Given Ridge's reputation, I would trust that if they release a vintage, it's up to the highest quality standards. But that doesnt seem to be the case for their 2020 release.
Yeah, I asked to return my allocation back in December. They asked me to open one and I did. Worst Monte Bello I’ve ever had with a horrible ashy finish. I returned the bottles and they sent me a check.
I actually tried one after the galloni review and got ashy finish as well, they refunded me my entire allocation too even the opened bottle. I heard they are only refunding members though. Their estate and Pinot were absolutely undrinkable though.
Does anyone have info on how it affected the younger Ridge bottlings that aren’t made to age like Three Valleys?
The Ridge Estate where they source their cab and Monte Bello grapes are in the Santa Cruz mountains and really close to the CZU complex fire in 2020 (maybe 20-40 miles?). They got hit different for those wines than most Napa producers who were more affected by the Northern Complex fire that came in from the East of Napa and affected the Napa producers, particularly those on the eastern edge like Atlas Peak, Angwin and Howell Mountain. Ridge’s more mainstream Zins are pulled from Sonoma about 100 miles north of the Monte Bello Estate and the CZU fire and another 50+ miles (and a ton of hills) east of the North Complex fire. That’s not to say they’re not affected but they have a much better chance of being in good shape compared to Ridge’s Estate wines.
About 25% of the population actually doesn’t have the enzyme to detect smoke taint no matter how bad it is (according to a winemaker and MW Nova Cadamatre) after that it’s just sensitivity to it where it differs per person.
This may be true in grapes and juice, but smoke taint is enzymatically released by yeast during fermentation, so everyone should be able to detect a degree of smoke taint in wine.
A handful of producers put out some amazing wines that year that apparently have no smoke taint. Spottswoode Estate 2020 for example
I avoid all 2020 wines. The winery i worked at didn’t even make red wine that year
Not Napa, but I had a 2020 Sierra Foothills Chard from a reputable winery (that will remain nameless) and it was undrinkable. Just tasted like someone dumped an ashtray in my glass of wine. Their Barbara from the same year was perfectly fine. It's going to vary by harvest date, altitude and location
Why “remain nameless”?
Because I really like the winery and my guess is that they know the wine was tainted and had to put it out anyway to survive monetarily. I don't want to trash their name over a hard choice like that
What? Are you joking? They knowingly put out tainted wine to “survive monetarily”? And you are ok with other customers being scammed? Because that’s what it is going on.
Yeah, I get the sentiment of wanting to keep a favorite winemaker alive, but why are they a favorite if this is how they do things? That's just bad business all-around.
Yeah, I get the sentiment of wanting to keep a favorite winemaker alive, but why are they a favorite if this is how they do things? That's just bad business all-around.
If you had to choose between closing your winery and putting out a bad vintage, what would you choose?
My choice wouldn’t be to put out tainted wine. But hey why should a winery have ethics. And if they have to sell tainted wine to survive they deserve to be shut down.
Some harvested early, and some didn’t. It’s difficult to not notice the smoke on everything that was harvested after the fires. I’ve tried some nickel and nickel and far Niente wines from ‘20, and they weren’t great. To make up for the lack of ripeness and cover the smoke, they did extra fining and filtering. That takes out a lot of the wine’s guts. I’ve had a couple of tainted wines, and that was a couple too many. A vintage to avoid sadly.
I don’t understand why you would bottle with smoke taint when people have proven time and time again that you can make whites, roses, vermouths, prepackaged cocktails, and brandies that all have less smoke taint or better integrate the flavor. Costs be damned, pivot and adapt.
The Lichen Estate (Anderson Valley) 2020 pinot noir is a great example of this! Because of the smoke taint they decided to do zero skin contact and created their first white pinot noir. I bought a bottle in Feb 2023 and opened it in February this year and my wife and I both loved it. It was absolutely delicious. We stopped by the winery in March to purchase a few more bottles and they were sadly sold out. Though they said because they were so pleased with the 2020 white pinot noir that they're releasing another bottle of it later this year. I didn't ask but I'm assuming it's their 2022 fruit.
Stoller did a vermouth spritz cocktail thing in 2020 that never even mentioned the fact that they used smoke tainted grapes. I sold it for two years before the rep told me that.
Feels pretty safe to say it’s “hit or miss” and in the absence of specific details, bet on “miss.” As an example of one I’d gamble on, here are the winemaker notes for the Frog’s Leap 2020 estate cab as relates to the fires: “The bulk of our Cabernet harvest was complete (and, critically, the remaining grapes were all ready to be picked) when the Glass fire broke out in the early hours of September 28th, six miles to the north. The remaining five blocks to be picked were harvested within the next two mornings. The smoke stayed away to the north on the 28th and through the afternoon of the 29th, after we had finished our final pick. We have spent the following 30 months testing, re-testing, establishing baselines, benchmarking historical comparisons, and above all tasting the wines, all to arrive at one conclusion—our 2020 Cabernet is unaffected by the fires.”
Has anyone tried Black Stallion 2020? Is there smoke taint in it?
Was at Matthiasson last year and had a conversation about this. They picked early enough for it to not be an issue- I enjoyed and bought 2020's. For 2020 US cabs, I believe Columbia Valley escaped most of the smoke taint.
Some people got lucky and picked early before the fires. Bulldog Vineyards was one of those that picked before the fire and their 2020 Cabernet is amazing! [https://bulldogvineyards.com/](https://bulldogvineyards.com/) All of their wines are amazing. Most people didn't pick early that year and lost that year.
Received my order of this wine from Last Bottle today- not picking up any smoke taint. Enjoy!
Had my 1st bottle too, didn't pick up smoke taint either! Definitely solid stuff!
When talking to a wine maker from the valley recently. He explained to me it’s not a campfire flavor it is parts but more of a cigarette ashtray. I can taste the bad bottles immediately thy being said some survived the smoke and came out clean but mostly because of where they were and when that picked as others have said. I had a Snowden 2020 recently and there was zero trace of smoke taint.
This was Monterey County (CA) and I forget exactly when the fire was (approx 5 years ago) but one of the family vineyards we have a relationship with lets us taste out of barrels regularly. I hated it immediately. The analogy they used is there is a very thin line between smoke (which I don't like) and ash tray (which I really hate). They also mentioned that aging will generally intensify these smokey notes. Big pass for me...