When wildfire smoke blanketed northern Michigan skies last month, Kasey Wierzba thought the vineyard at Shady Lane Cellars in Suttons Bay looked like a different planet.
“That kind of pinky, peachy haze really was filtering through the whole vineyard. The visibility was really minimal,” said Wierzba, the general manager and executive winemaker at Shady Lane Cellars, a winery and vineyard that sits on the “little finger” of the state on Leelanau Peninsula, a region famous for its winemaking.
Wierzba also thought about how the pungent smoke might impact the grapes, something that the larger wine industry is becoming more familiar with as global warming increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires. Though she and other local grape growers were spared — the worst of the wildfires were burning far away in Canada and Minnesota, the smoke didn’t linger long, and it’s still early in the growing season — climate change could bring the threat closer to home in the future.
Read more
