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The Atlas Peak Fire that sparked on Sunday October 8 has so far burned more than 50,000 acres in Napa County. The night it ignited, it roared down the eastern hills of Napa Valley and skirted the Silverado Trail, the site of some of the region’s most historic wineries. The blaze burned the Signorello Estate winery to the ground. It reduced the old farmhouse at Robert Sinskey Vineyards to rubble and singed its vines. But the large rectangular winery building was spared.

A week later, I visit the area with Mother Jones photographer editor Mark Murrmann. From the Sinskey winery’s gravel parking lot, we can still see fountains of smoke from the ongoing Nuns Fire Complex on the valley’s west side. The scar from the blaze has darkened the steep hill behind the estate, throwing into relief an untouched tree whose leaves have turned a brilliant turmeric. The entrance is flanked by a lemon tree on one side and a comma-shaped pond on the other, where flashy orange and white coi fish pilot around, oblivious to the near catastrophe of the previous week.

The tasting room is closed indefinitely, but deep inside the building, the cellar crew has returned. Cellarmaster Armando De Luna, a 32-year-old Napa native with a goatee whose sage-green baseball cap displays the name of his hometown, says returning to work has at least given him something to take his mind off of the region’s devastation: “Sitting at home and feeling hopeless is really shitty,” he says.

A note on the door of the Robert Sinskey Vineyards cellar a week after the Atlas Fire torched the vineyard but spared the winery building.
Robert Sinskey Vineyards’ cellarmaster Armando De Luna.
The Atlas Peak fire came within feet of the winery’s propane tank.

The night of the fire, De Luna lay awake in his Napa apartment next to his snoozing wife, Trisha, who’s eight-and-a-half months pregnant with the couple’s first child. An intense smell of smoke filtered through the windows. Worried the whole complex might be burning, De Luna jumped up to look outside, and then learned, via his phone’s Nixle emergency alerts, of the blaze on Atlas Peak.

When morning came, the couple was notified of a likely evacuation, and began packing up the gifts strewn around their apartment from their baby shower the week before. De Luna, kicking himself for not doing it sooner, took the new stroller out of the box and rushed to put it together. Trisha’s mother, who had lost power at her own house, arrived and sat glued to the images of vineyards burning on TV. At one point, De Luna recalls, she muttered that “a lot of winery workers are losing their jobs.” The words were like a jab in the gut. “I don’t have a job—that’s the first thing I thought of,” De Luna says. An image of the Sinskey winery flashed in his mind. “There’s no way it’s going to be there,” he thought.

The fire kept the Silverado Trail closed all week, but a friend who works for the city of Yountville was allowed back in, and he sent De Luna a string of photos of the Sinskey Winery in a text message. Cell service was still spotty and the photos came in slowly, one by one. “I had such a burst of adrenaline; my heart was racing and I was at the brink of tears,” De Luna recalls. Another photo loaded. The winery—where 80 percent of this year’s grape harvest was fermenting in large silver tanks or resting in French oak barrels deep underground—appeared untouched. The fire crept up towards a propane tank sitting right next to the building’s back entrance. The crew assumes that firefighters battled back the blaze so it didn’t cause an explosion. 

When he was finally able to return, assistant winemaker Zach Gabbert, 37, worried that several days without aeration and stirring had spoiled the fermenting wine. But when he and head winemaker Jeff Virnig checked it, “it was like, oh shit, all these tanks survived,” Gebbert says. “They did good. We were shocked.”

The vineyards on the estate didn’t fare as well. Thirty-year-old Cabernet vines are torched, and though they’re still standing, the fire likely charred the root stocks, says Gabbert, and will need to be re-planted—a process that can take five years.

The Robert Sinskey Vineyard’s tasting room is closed indefinitely as fires rage on to the west of the valley.
Merlot that De Luna transferred the morning of October 16, a week after fires forced tens of thousands of evacuations.
The Nuns Complex Fire smokes from hills to the northwest of Napa Valley, as seen from the Silverado Trail, October 16, 2017.

Cellar crew member Brandon Knowles, 33, wears a dust mask around his neck and clutches an empty white ceramic coffee mug as he reflects on the week’s events. “I’m just happy my friends are alive. Everyone I know is okay.” He says he’s been impressed with the way the community has joined together during this time of crisis, but worries that rebuilding won’t be easy for everyone. “It’s a wealthy area, but we’re all working class people here.”

De Luna echoes his concerns. “Not all of us make a ton of money out here,” he says. De Luna’s parents, who are of Mexican descent, also grew up in the area, and are active members of the local St. Apollinaris Church that’s providing food and shelter for those displaced by fires. “We get by with what we do, we work day to day to make that happen.” In 2016, tourists spent $1.92 billion in Napa Valley, and supported nearly 13,500 local jobs. “What are going to be the long-term effects if people don’t come back?” he worries.

In the meantime, there’s still a long list of tasks to complete to finish out this year’s harvest. De Luna leads us into a large maze of passageways that comprise the cave. It’s buried deep underground, right under the four-and-a-half acre vineyard. The air is cool and damp down here—a welcome relief from the smoke outside. He shows us the 12 barrels of this season’s biodynamic Merlot that he transferred from fermentation tanks into oak barrels this morning; they’ll age for 18 months.

Earlier this month, De Luna bought Knowles a bottle of Don Abraham reposado tequila, intending to give it to him on his birthday—which turned out to be the same day the Northern California firestorm ignited. Five days later, on Friday, the men sat down after work to open the bottle and share it with the crew. “We’re like, we’re here,” De Luna says. “We’re still standing and we’re all together. It was nice to sit with everybody and know that everybody’s okay.”

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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