Last Friday, April 7, a controlled burn by the Department of Conservation & Land Management of Western Australia (CALM) was anything but controlled. What was supposed to be a small burn resulted in a major bush fire with a large area of the Leeuwin Naturaliste Ridge national park being burnt. The fire jumped Caves Road and headed west towards the ocean. It was an extremely hot burn.

The smoke plume generated could be seen 20 - 30 kms north of Margaret River when the fire was at its height. At the time most of the smoke was heading west out to sea on an easterly breeze. Early Friday evening the sea breeze came in and returned the thick smoke and ash from whence it came and beyond.

Ash fell from the sky as far north as Gracetown, approx 15km north of Margaret River, while vineyards in close proximity to the fire feared for the affect the smoke and ash would have on unharvested grapes. The result of this will not be known until the grapes are harvested and the wine tasted and tested.

Similar events have occurred in previous years in the Pemberton region of W.A. with whole vintages being written off by smoke tainted wines. These events are still subject to an ongoing legal battle between the vignerons and CALM.

The importance to the wine industry of such events has lead to an officer from the WA Department of Agriculture (Kristen Kennison) commencing a PhD project on the affect of smoke taints in wine.

Let’s hope that in the future more communication will occur between all parties so that such important burns occur at a different time of the year rather than the final weeks of grape ripening.

I am interested to hear from anyone who may have had any experience with smoke affected grapes.

Vineman

Technorati Tags: smoke, taint, fire, wine, Leeuwin, Pemberton, Margaret River,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 9:01 pm and is filed under viticulture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.