AS I WRITE THIS COLUMN, THE 2018 HARVEST IS BEGINNING TO WIND DOWN in many parts of North America. Here in the North Coast of California we’re well past the halfway point and it appears the weather will permit some more hang time and picking to continue at a steady pace.

The final weeks of the 2018 vintage here in the North Coast have a much different feeling than last year when everyone was reeling from the devastation wrought by a series of explosive fires. While Napa and Sonoma counties were spared any major fires this year, Lake and Mendocino county were not so lucky as was much of the Pacific Northwest including British Columbia that experienced its worst fire season in history.

The threat of wildfires and the resulting risk of smoke contamination now appear to be risks similar to frosts and droughts in that growers and winemakers may have to reckon with them every vintage.

How climate change will affect the fire season of the West Coast is still unclear but changes in precipitation patterns could lead to an abundance of fire fuels on hillsides through longer, warmer and drier summers.

Yet our industry and the people in it have admirably responded to the specific tragedies of fires and the more nebulous threat posed by smoke. We are rebuilding throughout Northern California and wineries and people within the industry took the lead in fundraising to help those displaced by the fires. Researchers at universities throughout the West Coast, and the world, are studying smoke contamination while vendors continue to develop and refine technologies to remediate it.

Fires likely will bring more hardships in the future and a news report by our Northwest correspondent Peter Mitham on page 18 details how grape contracts may need to be completely rewritten to account for the risks of fire and smoke damage.

Those companies developing treatments for smoke contamination can be found in this issue listed in the pages of our annual Vendor Guide for Wineries and Vineyards. The guide should prove a useful resource for you in planning for the 2019 vintage or how to improve your business during the coming winter and spring. It’s a compendium of all the major vendors providing equipment and professional services for the North American wine industry.

In addition to our vendor guide, we explore the equipment and methods used in winery labs in two articles in this month’s Practical Winery & Vineyard section. I expect you may find the article on how conventional methods of sulfur dioxide analysis may be overestimating the level of S02 to be particularly compelling.

Another package of articles in this month’s Wine East section takes us to the northern frontier of grapegrowing, Scandinavia, where the VitiNord 2018 conference took place. While Wines & Vines is focused on North America, truly cool-climate growing in the northern latitudes is such a new element of the industry I hope growers and winemakers in states such as Minnesota and Wisconsin find these reports useful and thought provoking.

When this issue arrives at your home or office I hope the vintage has ended on a high note and that the next year brings clean, plentiful clusters and no smoke on the horizon.

—Andrew Adams