Minnesotans describe Napa nightmare: 'There's fires everywhere'

John Skupny hasn't had a chance to see the new Ryan Gosling-Harrison Ford movie "Blade Runner 2049" yet.

He's been living it.

In a continuing crisis, the Napa winemaker and other former Minnesotans living in Northern California's wine country are in their second week of a dystopian nightmare wrought by raging, far-ranging wildfires.

Dozens dead. Thousands of homes (among them, that of the late Minnesota native/"Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz) swallowed up in flames. Billions of dollars in damage, including world-class wines that never will reach anyone's lips.

The wine, of course, is the least important aspect, except when it comes to people losing their livelihoods.

"It feels like 'Blade Runner.' The whole family's mad at me that I stayed," said Skupny, who sent the rest of his clan north to Mendocino County, "and also it seems there are only men left in [tourist enclave] St. Helena."

Russell Bevan of Napa's Bevan Cellars knows the feeling. "We've been evacuated, allowed back, evacuated again. [Partner] Victoria [DeCrescenzo] went to my family's home, where they've been evacuated."

Perhaps cruelest of all: This is not over, as a ceaseless cycle of "We're OK, uh-oh, we're not OK" continues, with occasional respite and no end in sight.

"The biggest problem has been keeping track. It changes so fast," said Dave Ready Jr., an Edina native now making wines at Sonoma's Murphy-Goode. "You'll have blue sky and then will be socked in with smoke.

"There's fires everywhere. They're all close, but they're also everywhere. When people talk about where the fires are, it's not like 'You take Vernon Avenue to Blake Road and take a right.' Your texts go off every minute and a half with the next update or someone asking, 'So how are they doing on the fires?' And nobody knows."

It started on Oct. 8, a leisurely evening in the town of Napa for longtime Minneapolitan Adam McClary.

"I went outside, and it was like a little campfire smell. And then the winds really started picking up and then a lot more smell, and then I'm walking down my driveway and there's ash in the air. And the creepy thing about that is that when there's ash, that means it's blowing your way."

"I said first things first, sleep in your clothes and not pajamas," McClary said. "At 4 a.m. we got a tweet, and five minutes later the sheriff was at the door, telling us to evacuate."

The most dangerous fire at that stage had started up the hill at an area called Atlas Peak, where Shaffer works as manager of viticulture and winery relations at the renowned Stagecoach Vineyard. They stayed with a friend and brought along a menagerie of pets: "three chickens, five cats, one gigantic vineyard dog, two chinchillas and two goldfish," McClary recounted. "Unfortunately, we lost one of our goldfish, Billy Ocean."

The good news: All the fruit for Gamling & McDuck had been picked and was in tanks up in Calistoga. Later that week, that northern Napa town was evacuated, so McClary sneaked around police barricades to do "punchdowns" (pushing skin and pulps back into the juice).

The bad news: Only about 40 percent of Stagecoach's coveted grapes, which sell for upward of $8,000 a ton, had been picked, and access was available only by air. Through a family connection, vineyard manager Esteban Llamas was able to take a helicopter to the vineyard and give Shaffer an update.

"Some perimeter blocks have burned, but the vineyard is mostly intact," she said. "But with the hot winds and no irrigation, the leaves and some of the fruit are desiccated."

McClary made light of the shortage of protective masks in the area, and of social media.

"The best thing about this is that I have an excuse to wear a bandanna," he said. "And the Facebook feeds are just goofy as hell: Tragedy, tragedy, tragedy. Oh, here's a puppy playing. Tragedy, tragedy, ah, a golf photo.

"The truth is, we're busting our [butts], waiting on things, trying to help friends. Everybody's rattled. It's pretty wild, and the only thing to do at the end of the day is drink wine."

The flames, fueled by high winds and dry conditions on the ground, destroyed many wineries and vineyards and blocked access to others.

The fires arrived at a particularly bad time for cabernet sauvignon growers and producers. Most pinot noir and white grapes had been picked, but not cab or zinfandel in many cases. Not good for someone like Ready who makes mostly red wines and sources grapes from an array of locales.

"So we haven't figured out the exact damage to the vineyards."

About 75 percent of Bevan's fruit is in. Aiming to prevent damage to still-hanging grapes, he asked those growers "to take 200 gallons [of water] per acre to blast the clusters and take off soot and ash."

But no one is asking workers to put themselves in harm's way. "There's no reason for anyone to die over some fruit," Skupny said.

One of many unknowns is whether and how smoke taint might affect the vintage. In 2008, Mendocino County vineyards were sporadically covered in smoke for weeks on end during the summer, and the pinot noirs in particular were redolent with smoke.

Bevan, a self-taught vintner who wrote about wine in these pages a couple of decades ago, said he believes the late-season fires won't have the same effect.

Power outages have complicated matters, preventing many wineries from controlling fermentation temperatures and in general vinifying in the manner to which they are accustomed. "We're making wine the way they did 400 years ago," Bevan noted.

All of which means that it will be tough to assess what the 2017 vintage will be like. But for these Minnesota transplants, that's well down their list of concerns.

"It's the uncertainty and the smoke," Ready said, "and I've got so many friends who've lost houses through this, I can't even keep track. And how many people will stay here, and how long is it going to take to rebuild this thing?"

Plus there are more practical, personal concerns.

"I just want to breathe some fresh air. I kind of took that for granted," Ready said, getting in the words between a couple of robust coughs.