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With wildfire season starting earlier and ending later, the fires burning hotter and moving faster, ‘smoke taint’ has become an increasing problem in wine regions around the world.
Scientists, however, have stepped up and the problem of smoke-damaged grapes and wines appears to be moving from costly catastrophe to a manageable problem – in all but the worst cases.
Thanks to a decade of research, winemakers and grape-growers now have an arsenal of strategies for salvaging a vintage threatened by smoke from wildfires.
The latest research on the subject, unveiled this week – September 23 2026 – at Wine Tasmania’s Wine Symposium in Hobart, shows how much progress has been made. The researchers from the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA) declared it’s possible to make “good quality sparkling wine from grapes that have been affected by bushfire smoke”.
After 10 years of trials, they said they have found a way to nullify the sensory impact of smoke compounds on sparkling wine during the ageing process.
TIA food scientist Dr Naomi Vinden confirmed: “We’re ready and have an option for preventing major financial losses due to unpalatable smoke-affected wine.”
Alison Ctercteko, who is studying a PhD on smoke taint in grapes and wine at TIA, added: “Results so far have been very promising. I’ve determined that I can remove the smoke taint compounds.”
“But it’s a matter of reducing the smoke taint while retaining as much of the desirable aromatics of the wine as possible. I’ve got to make sure I’m retaining the lovely Pinot Noir or Chardonnay fruit flavours in the wine and I’m not stripping them out.
“I’ve been using different levels of smoke taint, different varieties of grapes and the methods appear to be working.”
Another promising avenue of research involves using naturally occurring bacteria to treat the problem in the vineyard before the affected fruit reaches the winery. It’s not easy to detect the volatile phenols responsible for “smoky”, “ashy”, “campfire” flavors during fruit sampling, as they are bound as flavorless glycoconjugates within the fruit. But they become increasingly apparent once they are released through fermentation and ageing.
Researchers from the ARS Plant Gene Expression Center in Albany, California, USA, have discovered that Gordonia alkanivorans, a bacterium that can occur naturally on grape leaves, is able to break down guaiacol, one of the main phenols responsible for smoke taint in wine.
“We found two strains of the same species of Gordonia alkanivorans that can use guaiacol as their only food source,” said Devin Coleman-Derr, ARS Research molecular biologist.
The researchers sequenced the strains’ genomes and studied which genes were active when Gordonia alkanivorans were given access to guaiacol. They found that a gene called guaA produced an enzyme that was key to breaking down guaiacol into a harmless compound. In addition, the guaA enzyme broke down only guaiacol and not the phenols responsible for the desirable flavours in wine.
Though guaiacol is just one of several phenols responsible for smoke taint, Coleman-Derr said the findings show that using bacteria like this is another potential solution.
“This research provides a roadmap for finding bacteria and other microbes that can target other problematic chemicals in or on plants,” he said.
Other strategies already developed to minimise the perception of smoke taint in finished wines include the application of ozone gas to harvested grapes (prior to pressing and vinification), minimising the duration of skin contact during fermentation by whole-bunch pressing, using cooler temperatures and selected yeast strains for the fermentation, using reverse osmosis or activated carbon fining to finish the wine, adding oak chips and tannins to mask the ashtray aromas and flavours, and blending or diluting smoke-tainted wine with an unaffected wine.
As smoke taint impacts red wines more than whites, rosés or sparkling wines – due to the length of skin contact – researchers at the University of California, Davis, have been examining the effectiveness of oak-ageing on lowering the perceived intensities of smoke character in Napa and Lodi Cabernet Sauvignons. They found oak barrel aging “increased the concentrations of volatile phenols and volatile phenol glycosides, but at the same time lowered the perceived intensities of smoke taint sensory attributes and improved the perceived quality of the smoke-affected wines”.
Scientists searching for solutions have now dismissed as ineffective strategies such as partial leaf removal, washing vines or grapes with water, aqueous ethanol, or milk, either during or after smoke exposure, and spraying kaolin clay to grapevines and their fruit prior to smoke exposure.
However, another study at UC Davis is evaluating the application of a calcium spray – currently used by grape-growers to strengthen cell walls in developing berries – to see if the treatment can decrease absorption of smoke into Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay grapes. The findings will be published “later this year or early 2027”.
As many of the current solutions only work for mildly-affected grapes, scientists have also been checking out the possibility of using smoke-tainted grapes in the production of spirits, biofuels and sanitisers in cases where wine cannot be produced. Oak-aged brandies are one of the best alternative uses, according to distiller and former winemaker Hugh Holds, who made a smoked and barrel-aged brandy from smoke-damaged fruit for his PhD studies at the University of Adelaide in Australia. The 400 bottles were released on the fifth anniversary of the Cudlee Creek bushfire – one of the ‘Black Summer’ fires (2019-2020) which saw 17 million hectares (42 million acres) burning across southeastern Australia.
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