Vineyards assess damage as wildfire rips through California wine country: ‘a devastating situation.’ The growing threat of fires has shaken the Napa valley wine industry, as fears of smoke-spoiled grapes and soaring insurance rates put vintners on edge.

I had a wine which tasted like licking an ashtray. It genuinely tasted like smoke.

I looked it up, and apparently grapes get affected by smoke from nearby fires. The smoke aromas / particles? get encapsuled in sugar. When you eat the grapes, they taste normal. However, when the grapes are being made into wine, the sugar breaks down and releases the accumulated stuff from smoke, leading to a crappy wine which tastes like ashtray.

In an ideal world, wine like this would not be sold. But since winemakers have their whole livelihood depending on it, they sell the wine anyway. So if you buy wine, there is a non-zero chance that you end up buying awful, undrinkable stuff.

I’ve read professional opinions on what to do if you have such wine – the wine-expert wrote “pour it into the drain of the kitchen sink”.

With increasing wildfires chances are a lot more wineries will sell crappy wines. “Bad vintage”. It just sucks for the average folks who occasionally buy a bottle of wine because chances are that money is wasted as there isn’t much opportunity to know wether a wine is good or not before you buy and open it at home.

https://billybuttonwines.com.au/smoke-taint-in-wine/