If ever I needed to be reminded of how quickly one’s circumstances can change in this lifetime, last Thursday, August 21, was just that thunderclap moment. Carlos Mendez (Craig Employee No. 1, hire date January 1990) had cooked all day in the heat to supply our annual “shed party” (we no longer have the shed at the Affinity vineyard, so we hold it at the downtown Salon) with carnitas worthy of song. It’s a time to annually welcome our interns to the Napa Valley, and Brittany and Leo seem like they will be top quality crush hands in 2025. We were also welcoming Pam Novak in as our new director of Consumer Sales at RCW where she will work to replace the irreplaceable Scott Johnson. More to come there.
The entire company turned out, and the music played, and the wine flowed, and the food was brilliant, late summer was in full bloom, and I wish I could have frozen that moment in time. Lisa Crean showed me a fire alert on her phone that indicated the Pickett fire that began near Calistoga was on its way toward Howell Mountain. “No worries,” I thought, all of that fuel burned in the Glass Fire of 2020.
Well, it didn’t. With extreme heat, wind and steep rocky terrain, the Pickett Fire was on us by nightfall and the interns hit the couches of Kiersten and Jason.
Thankfully the wind was blowing the smoke away from us to the north and east, and I thought we had for once dodged a bullet. Then Cal Fire lit a back burn just south of our Candlestick Vineyard on Friday evening and there it was: disaster. The thick smoke billowed over our vineyard from the back burn that evening and into the morning. We will see what the results are for guaiacol (how I wish I didn’t know how to spell that) when the chemistry reports come back on grape samples from ETS labs, but I’m not overly optimistic. Smoke taint equals lost crop.
After the fires of 2020 where we lost 90% of our crop, the financial penalty was immense. Insurance (which has gone from $40K per year for good coverage to now $300K per year for zilch) covered about half of the losses, and we were just barely recovering from that catastrophe, when this hit us. We are $1M into the farming on Candlestick this year that’s down the drain, and our crop insurance will only pay out about $300K.
Down the road, we are looking at zero revenue in 2026/27/28 when we would expect $4.5MM in bottled wine sales from this vineyard. For our little company, I just don’t know if we can do this again, but I’m attempting to stay positive. It’s some seriously depressing math.
Silverado Farming Company and Nick Antignano and his crew in particular had prepared the highest quality fruit we have ever produced on our vineyards this year, and that makes this even more of a gut punch. Yet none of us are lost, other folks have it worse than us, and we still have high quality produce on our Winery Estate Vineyard and on Mount Veeder. It’s painful to think of the rare large mammals who need this habitat to survive. The world is poorer without Mountain Lions, Bobcats, Deer, and Bears roaming around. I think the world would be poorer without Robert Craig Winery’s exquisite wines as well, so we’re going to dig like hell to survive this.
Thank you for your generous support and encouragement in this tough time. It means the world to us and it is a huge help. Looking at yesterday’s sales from people who viewed my instagram post (@eltonslone2, @robertcraigwinery), I think I’ll announce a fire annually. Seriously, it’s just a major hand up in paying these farming costs and infrastructure costs immediately out of pocket from the flames.
Obviously we won’t be receiving payment for $300K in fruit sales this year that we usually use to pay a significant portion of our farming bills. I was teary eyed yesterday as Scott updated me on the orders flowing in. Truly, the biggest help to us is in picking up some of our world class wine. I’m toasting you Craignation, and we are all going to sing songs into the night when we get to the other side of this. The love you have shown us will certainly come back.
Love and Peace,
Elton & The Entire Craig Crew
#pickettfire #howellmountain #theresnoplacelikehowell #robertcraigwinery #craignation #insurance #isitthebeginningortheend #getsomeCraig #RCWwines
