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You Can Help California's Wine and Craft Beer Country Rebound From The Fires By Doing This

Tara Nurin
This article is more than 6 years old.

UPDATED 11/1/17 TO INCLUDE NEW DAMAGE ESTIMATES.

On the day after she fled her Santa Rosa, California, home, cautiously steering through the wreckage of her neighborhood with her terrified 20-year-old daughter following closely behind, my dear friend Herlinda Heras whispered on the phone to me, “We usually help everybody else. Who’s going to help us?”

Honestly, I have chills typing those words, thinking back on the weeks that followed the October 8 inception of the Northern California wildfires that have so far destroyed at least 110,000 acres of the richest wine and craft beer land in the nation but are finally, mercifully, almost entirely contained. In the days after the most expensive fires in U.S. history -- and the state's worst natural disaster in a century -- swept through California's North Bay and North Coast regions, I read news and social media reports frantically, writing near-panicked emails to check on the site of the nation’s first ground-up modern craft brewery; sending Facebook messages to a friend forced to abandon his vineyard; trying to reassure a colleague choosing which laminated credentials to save from a decades-long career as a beer chef; and talking to Herlinda whenever she needed it, proverbially holding her hand across 3,000 miles of phone line, hoping against the odds that the Tubbs fire devouring the blocks around her just-constructed home in Coffey Park would somehow stop short of her newly delivered doors and windows.

Herlinda Heras

The fires spared Herlinda … barely. They also left alone most of the spots that I’d visited on a two-week pilgrimage to Napa and Sonoma counties this summer: the warehouse that housed New Albion Brewing from 1976-1982; Flanagan Vineyards, where Herlinda and I spent an afternoon laughing and tasting with the winery’s “Chief Storyteller” Jim Morris; the cliffside Redwood forest bungalow where we celebrated Independence Day with the team from Rio Crest Winery; the irreplaceable credentials of "homebrew chef " Sean Paxton and the voluminous library of beer historian Jay Brooks; the industrial park that houses old-timer Brian Hunt’s Moonlight Brewing. The fires even avoided Russian River Brewing owners Natalie and Vinnie Cilurzo, who found themselves triple-exposed with a house and second brewery under construction practically adjacent to their existing cult-destination brewpub, which shelters New Albion’s original wooden sign and sits smack in downtown Santa Rosa, the epicenter of the fires.

Mike Azinheira

Not all of Herlinda’s friends were so lucky. As a longtime Sonoma County resident, personal chef and official tour guide, a Sonoma State University adjunct beer instructor and host of KSRO radio’s weekly Brew Ha Ha beer segment, she knows just about everyone in the local beer, wine, food and spirits scene. Though none were physically harmed, dozens got burned. Badly.

“500 homes destroyed by us. Just saw one block from my street. Like a bomb hit it. Or the apocalypse,” she texted at one point, updating me over subsequent days about the dozens of friends losing everything but their lives.

Miraculously, no breweries or distilleries number among the approximately 7,000 structures damaged or destroyed in Napa and Sonoma counties, including a reported 590 commercial properties in Sonoma, totaling $132 million in estimated losses in the county so far. Of the 1,200 wineries that dot the fertile landscape, fewer than ten suffered much destruction. (Paradise Ridge Winery in Santa Rosa got the worst of it, losing both its production facility and tasting room.) Ninety percent of the area’s grape crop was harvested before the blaze, and most winery tasting rooms have reopened. Even most of the vines remain intact, and strangely, their fresh state at harvest provided a relatively watery barrier that helped firefighters stop the flames from spreading. This good news, however, doesn’t mean the struggle isn’t deep or painful.

Herlinda Heras

“Many residents and businesses, even those not directly impacted by the fires, lost weeks of work as fires forced evacuations and road closures,” reads a press release published by Visit California, the state’s official tourism bureau.

Tom McCormick, executive director of the California Craft Brewers Association, says in addition to the temporary evacuations of Sonoma’s Carneros Brewing and Bear Republic Brewing, which opened a second facility in Rohnert Park days before the fires, “Most of the breweries suffered during the fires from power outages, street closures, no water service, etc… Many were not able to brew beer during that period. All of the breweries in the region have been impacted directly by lack of business, staffing issues and other indirect impacts.”

Tara Nurin

Some of those who might have made it to work may have had bigger preoccupations. For example, Rob Kent, head brewer at Bear Republic, lost his home, as did Sonoma County Winegrowers President Karissa Krause, who says the county is starting to survey winemakers this week about the extent of their damage as some of them are just now getting to assess conditions.

“It really is baby steps,” she says. “For the last three weeks we’ve been operating in complete crisis mode: how much loss is there, is everyone safe? Now we’re starting to think on the more hopeful side about rebuilding.”

Of course, employees who could work right away did … and got right to work helping others.

George Rose

Krause’s association has launched the Sonoma County Grapegrowers Foundation, which has raised $300,000 in little over a week from local wineries and out-of-town oenophiles to assist the county farm bureau in securing housing, utility payments and household supplies for both documented and undocumented field workers. Within two days of the fires blowing past her brewery, Natalie Cilurzo posted these pictures on Facebook that shows her kitchen staff cooking for first responders; she later announced that the brewery would, for the first time, raffle off the opportunity to be first in line at its celebrated annual Pliny the Younger beer release. Bear Republic is serving free food to first responders and has collected $7,200 for the five employees who lost homes. St. Florian’s Brewery, whose head brewer is a fire department captain in Windsor, held a quick fundraiser, and Santa Rosa’s Cooperage Brewing has joined with Peloton Culinary & Catering to plan a raffle and a separate pairing dinner.

Heineken-owned Lagunitas Brewing donated $100,000 to the Redwood Credit Union North Bay Relief Fund and is organizing a benefit concert next month. Until November 11, the brewery is donating $1 from every bottle sold at its four nationwide taprooms to charity and it’s brewing a benefit lager with Moonlight, in which it owns a minority stake, to sell across California. The Petaluma brewery, which missed the fires by five miles, is also partnering with Moonlight to brew a beer under the Sonoma Pride name. Sonoma Pride began as a Russian River series in 2015 to celebrate Sonoma County but the Cilurzos have now enjoined approximately 50 breweries from as far away as Florida to brew a Sonoma Pride beer with 100% of proceeds going to support wildfire relief. Russian River released its hoppy blonde ale Tuesday, and thanks to other breweries who released their versions earlier, has already raised $243,000.

Herlinda Heras

For those who don’t have access to the bounty of California beer or wine, some supporters across the country are doing what they can for their colleagues out west, who, normally flush with money and tied together by their can-do communal California spirit, often, as Herlinda says, “help everybody else.”

Three wine pros from California and beyond have formed Winemakers & Sommeliers for California Wildfire Relief to host nationwide events designed to raise money for the ad-hoc California Wine Strong, Redwood Credit Union North Bay Fire Relief and Napa Valley Community Foundation to benefit fire victims in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Yuba counties. The group is staging its fourth event, a $50 food and California wine pairing in Philadelphia on November 8 in conjunction with Philly Wine Week and Drexel University Center for Food and Hospitality Management.

Some efforts are smaller yet no less important: for instance, using the hash tag #PhillyLovesCali, Philly Wine Week participants are working to organize a week’s worth of “Philly Wine Week Presents: Clink to California” benefits. And on Sunday I attended a New Jersey vinifera tasting where the four winemakers in attendance donated $1 from every bottle sold to their California compatriots.

Mariah_Harkey

Beer drinkers won’t have as much luck finding easy ways to help. While small breweries up and down the California coastline are making significant sacrifices, the farther away one gets, the less craft brewers seem to get involved. However, there is an important way for empathetic beer and wine drinkers to contribute to the cause, even if supporting their local producers isn’t one of them.

“Now is the time to visit Wine Country,” writes Visit California President and CEO Caroline Beteta in a statement. “If you’re already planning a trip, don’t cancel — Wine Country residents need your business now more than ever.”

“We need people to visit,” adds Tim Zahner, interim CEO of Sonoma County Tourism. The county has posted by far the most significant insurance losses of the affected six-county region: $2.8 billion out of a total $3.2 billion in claims. “We are open and ready to welcome guests. We are #SonomaStrong.”

A study released in September shows that almost 24 million visitors travel to California’s various wine regions each year, contributing more than $7 billion to the economy. With Visit California urging that “Tourism is The Wine Country’s lifeblood,” Beteta concludes her statement by writing, “We are doing everything we can to tell the world it’s time to visit #CaliforniaWineCountryNOW.”