Vineyards

We live in a county of vineyards and the wine industry is an important part of the economy here. With fires raging all over the place, there was great concern for the vineyards. Smoke taint ruins the grapes even if the vines don't burn. It turns out that 90% of the grapes had been harvested before the fires started and a few were even picked at night as the fires burned.

Our local talk radio station has a morning host, a woman named Pat Kerrigan who did the most superb job of reporting round the clock for the first few days. She sorted out the crucial information such as evacuations and routes during the early hours when it was dark, fires were visible on all sides, and the roads were a chaos of people trying to leave. She was calm and able to sort out the rumors from the reality. Many Santa Rosans abandoned network news and stayed tuned to Pat Kerrigan.

As the days wore on and the fires grew, fire crews came to assist from all over. I wouldn't say things were calmer, but they were certainly more organized. Pat Kerrigan found the right people with the right information and interviewed them.  One of those interviews was with a firefighter who explained how fires burn, how they decide which things to let burn and which things to protect, and when they start backfires. She said that vineyards are actually very good firebreaks. The vines are slow to burn and burn slowly if they do catch fire. The spaces between rows of vines serve as mini firebreaks.

I took today's picture from the same spot as I took this one at 3am. There are a lot of steep vineyards in the hills around us, and there has been talk about banning more as they remove the natural vegetation and destroy the watershed. I wonder if that feeling will change. The vineyards  that line the highway through the Sonoma Valley where we live are mostly undamaged, even when the accompanying wineries have burned down. Ordinarily, these vines would be red and gold. As I noticed with the trees around here, the moisture seems to have been sucked out of the leaves and they have gone quickly from green to gone, but the plants have survived.

It would seem that not only did the wine from the vines that grow all around us help us get through this ordeal, the vines on which they grow are actually a protection against wildfires.