Using the adjective ‘giddy’ to describe a researcher’s mood isn’t common. Researchers, after all, often take years to make progress, meaning that patience is a more typical mindset.
But Oregon State researcher Elizabeth Tomasino, PhD, is practically giddy about the progress made in understanding and combating smoke taint over the past five years.
“Yes, we’ve made a lot of strides,” says Tomasino, an associate professor who also works with the school’s Oregon Wine Research Institute. “And the progress we have made has been quite exciting.”
So exciting, in fact, that researchers around the world may have, since the first California wine country fires, identified new tools for grape growers and winemakers to use to predict if and how badly taint could affect their grapes. And even, perhaps, ways to better diminish the effects of smoke taint.
Having said that, there is still a long way to go.
“We get questions all of the time, and it’s perfectly understandable, like ‘Why can’t we just wash off the grapes?’ “ says Tomasino. “But it’s not that simple, even if we wish it would be.”
The impact of smoke taint
There’s a simple reason so little is known about smoke taint and what it does to grapes and wine. It hasn’t been a problem, save in Australia, for most of the past century (if not longer). Tomasino says there has been almost no research done in the previous century, given how few instances of smoke taint were seen and how few fires affected vineyards before climate change increased wildfire chances in the past 20 years. “You don’t need to know about something like wildfires until they happen,” she says.
The exception was one European study some 80 years ago, but that hasn’t been much help, she says. Those early 20th-century researchers, while identifying some of the symptoms and results of smoke taint, weren’t quite sure what they had found.
That all changed in 2017 in California, when smoke taint became a problem that couldn’t be ignored. It was the beginning of coordinated research in North America in California, Oregon, Washington state, and Canada’s province of British Columbia, as well as continued efforts in Australia, where the latter have made tremendous strides in identifying taint and its effects.
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