California wineries face difficult year with heatwave, wildfires, pandemic
Ediz Tiyansan
03:07

Heatwaves and wildfires, coming right on top of the coronavirus pandemic, have caused a variety of complications for wine makers, who’ve struggled in harvesting on time, getting quality grapes, or even securing enough orders. 

Workers at the Hickman Winery in California are salvaging grapes that can still make good wine, as they missed the harvest season by several weeks.

“This year the biggest issue between the heatwave and the fires, and then you throw in the covid issue, there’s a lot of wine grapes hanging out there right now that just aren’t going to make quality wine, this is going to be one of the lowest production years in history, I believe," said Tod Hickman of Hickman Winery.

Tod Hickman runs this family owned vineyard for over 20 years, striving to make quality wine.  

But he’s constantly having to adapt to the changing climate conditions.

“So yeah, the heat is definitely an issue, it’s been getting hotter and hotter every year. One of the tools is obviously water, give the grapes more water, keep the soil wetter. But the biggest push is that I’m changing the varietals that I’m growing," Tod Hickman said.

In many parts California this year’s grape harvest season was delayed initially because of the heatwaves, but in some regions like this one they saw yet another delay because of wildfires and evacuations orders. In this vineyard alone, the owners say they’ve lost at least 50% of their crops.

And in wildfire zones, the smoke ash falling on the grapes could give a “smoke taint” to the wine they yield.

“Smoke was low and there was lots of ash and you can see the ash on the grapes, that’s a whole other issue, then you know definitely I could see how there could be some taste, and some issues with that," Tod Hickman said.

With the distillery located adjacent to the harvest site, it’s a small field-to-flask production the bigger part of their business relies on agritourism — which has gone down significantly.

“More than 75% of my business is down, because of the fact that we’re not allow to have events, and people don’t really come out for tastings because we were closed for a while, and we are now allowed to be open for outdoor tastings," said Alyse Hickman of Hickman Winery.

 They were aiming to celebrate their 10th anniversary with the largest expected growth this year, but it’s turning out to be the worst and they aren’t even bottling any wines this year.

“Because we don’t have the tourists coming in, we don’t know when the tourists are going to be able to come in. We can’t really do that right now, we can only take all of our money that we have and just put it towards bills," Alyse Hickman said.

Any hope for a gradual reopening was crushed by the wildfires.

“One is super hot because its been hotter than normal for summers, so they won’t come out because its hot, and two, they won’t come out due to the fact that air quality is horrible, and so nobody goes anywhere, and three, the fires have closed a lot of the freeways that people are going to be traveling on, so a lot of people can’t even get to us anymore," she said.

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