Smoke Taint Research Set Ablaze as Trump Cuts Federal Funding

Last Thursday, thousands of government employees across the country sat down with their supervisors and received the news: Their positions were cut. 

The culling included two of the country’s leading smoke taint researchers, Arran Rumbaugh and Torey Arvik. Rumbaugh has been leading a years-long research program with the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) to understand the effects of wildfire on grapevines and find new remediation methods for grapes and wine impacted by smoke—an increasingly common occurrence in the age of climate change. 

Four other ARS grape researchers (four in California, one in Washington, one in New York) also lost their jobs. “Right now we don’t have a single scientist solely dedicating their research on smoke taint in California,” says Rumbaugh of the ARS.

It’s grim news. The California wine industry suffered nearly $4.2 billion in smoke taint damage from the devastating blazes of 2020 alone. The path forward is uncertain—currently, there are no fail-safe solutions to remedy the wine fault.

“Smoke has been one of the biggest economic impacts for the wine industry in recent years,” says Alisa Jacobson, the winemaker at Turning Tide and co-chair of the West Coast Smoke Exposure Task Force subcommittee on research. “It’s really discouraging.”

Both lawmakers have joined the chorus of industry experts sounding the alarm on the potential long-term impacts.

“In firing the only two smoke exposure researchers in our region, Elon Musk and his Republican enablers are not only throwing out a decade of research progress, they are making it harder for our agriculture producers to recover after wildfires strike,” Congressman Mike Thompson said in a recent press release. “The only waste, fraud and abuse here is that losing this research is a waste.”

Research Set Aflame

Rumbaugh’s role was created after fires ravaged the West Coast in 2020. Her mission: understand grapevines’ physiological responses to smoke, find ways to salvage smoke-impacted grapes and  develop rapid smoke-impact detection tools. 

Rumbaugh and her team have been working in tandem with colleagues in Oregon, Washington and New York to find ways to combat the next great fire event. 

“In some ways I see this as a slap to the face of the grape and wine industry,” says Rumbaugh. “After the 2020 fires, they asked for support. They received it, and now it’s being taken away.”

That year, between 165,000 to 325,000 tons of California grapes were left to waste because of wildfire smoke, resulting in billions of dollars of economic loss. More than 4.3 million acres burned throughout the state.

“Wildfires are only becoming more frequent and severe in California and beyond,” says Natalie Collins, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers. “This research is critical.”

In the last five years, fires have decimated California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Quebec. Another 4.2 million acres-plus have burned across the Golden State during this time.

“You don’t have to believe in climate change to be worried about fire,” says Jacobson. “They’re very real.”

When the 2020 fires hit some winemakers scrapped the vintage entirely, some released wines kissed with smoke and others salvaged red grapes by pressing them into white wines. 

There were no perfect remedies for those affected. “The best way to test is currently to do a micro-fermentation,” says Jacobson. “The winery would be responsible for picking a grape sample, fermenting it on a small scale and sending that off to the lab. It’s labor intensive and expensive.”

Rumbaugh and team were working to find solutions that winemakers and growers could apply to save their grapes when fires hit.

Scorching Results

Recently, Rumbaugh has been working on passive samplers: absorbent tubes that can be placed in a vineyard to absorb the smoke concentration. 

“We can then measure compounds in that smoke and correlate it with impacts on grapes and wines,” says Rumbaugh. “It would be a cheap and readily-available method for monitoring smoke impacts in a vineyard via a rapid screening method.”

It’s huge progress from where the industry was in 2020, when it would take three to seven weeks to get results from a test back. 

With her role eliminated, these kinds of advancements could be lost. 

“That’s our biggest concern—momentum,” says Collins. “We were making so much progress. It’s challenging to see this all come to an end overnight.”

Only three researchers in the private-public wine grape industry group West Coast Smoke Exposure Task Force (WCSETF) are left.

In January, Anita Oberholster, one of the leading smoke taint researchers and a huge resource and light in the industry (and a 2022 Wine Star Award winner), lost her battle with cancer—yet another tough blow to the cause.