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San Francisco Chronicle​

They can't get fire insurance. So California wineries are seeking out fire trucks and military tech

As summer approaches and Napa Valley 's vineyards grow lush, the specter of wildfire looms. The memory of Napa's two most destructive wildfire years — 2017 and 2020 — is fresh, but preparing for future events has become difficult. Many property owners here can no longer access or afford fire insurance, and in April the Trump administration terminated a $34 million grant that the Biden administration had awarded to the county for fire mitigation efforts. So the Napa Valley community, particularly its vintners, has taken matters into its own hands. Wineries are hiring private firefighting forces, buying professional equipment and training their vineyard employees to operate it. Some have installed underground bunkers for water storage to supply their extensive sprinkler systems. Others are considering a not-yet-ready autonomous technology that would create a 'dome' of fire protection around a large property. Few have invested more than Cyril Chappellet, CEO and chairman of Chappellet Winery, who does not have fire insurance and is spending several hundred thousands of dollars a year on fire prevention efforts. His secret weapon: an Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting truck, a specialized vehicle used at airports to extinguish fires on commercial airplanes. 'If a jet lands and it's blowing up — this is the kind of fire truck we have,' said his wife Blakesley Chappellet. (New versions of this truck can cost over $1 million, but Chappellet said he got a great deal at auction.) Napa Valley represents a unique intersection of the rural and the wealthy, and some vintners like Chappellet are using resources that many California landowners could only dream of. Coupled with the work of an increasingly powerful local fire prevention nonprofit, the valley's wine industry is paying mightily to steel itself against the possibility of another Glass Fire. 'If we're not spending that money on insurance, we need to spend what we can afford on making ourselves safer,' said Cyril Chappellet. 'I know that other vineyards and other wineries are doing the same thing.' Writing some big checks Chappellet Winery's perch, high on Pritchard Hill in Napa Valley's remote eastern hillsides, affords one of the region's most picturesque views. The location also makes it vulnerable to wildfires. In 2017, the Atlas Fire burned just behind Chappellet's 700-acre property. A Cal Fire handline, shoveling away to create a barrier, stopped the blaze before it reached the vineyards. But when fire returned in August 2020, Cal Fire was stretched thin, fighting the hundreds of lightning fires that had sparked throughout the state simultaneously. Chappellet sensed that this time, he and his neighbors would have to save their vineyards themselves. Nearby wineries, including Ovid and Colgin, had bulldozers onsite that they'd been using to clear rocks for new vineyard plantings. The drivers quickly switched gears, working 'like the most incredible choreographed ballet,' Chappellet said, using the machines to carve a 3.5-mile break in the vegetation that was fueling the fire. 'The Hennessey fire was literally stopped by that firebreak,' Chappellet said. 'We all pitched in and made it happen. I wrote some big checks. Some of my neighbors wrote some big checks.' The 2017 and 2020 fires spooked insurance carriers, some of whom exited Napa County altogether. The only carrier Chappellet could convince to insure him, Lloyd's of London, earlier this year quoted him an annual premium that would have been $1.5 million more than what he paid before 2017. He and Blakesley flew to London and gave a presentation to the underwriters to show their extreme prevention efforts. That brought their premium quote down to $1.2 million over their former rate. That still wasn't affordable, given the historically dire state of the wine business at the moment. So Chappellet is still without fire insurance. But Chappellet has insurance of another sort: a hard-plumbed sprinkler system surrounding the winery that can be deployed remotely. A network of hoses at each of the property's homes, where Chappellet, his brother, his mother and several employees live. In addition to the aircraft fire truck, he bought a truck from the Carmel Fire Department; an 8,000-gallon custom-built water trailer that can follow the trucks around; and another trailer filled with a biodegradable, fire-retardant gel that could envelop a structure and provide three to four hours of intense protection. Chappellet's employees practice regular evacuation and fire drills, and the maintenance work on brush clearing is nonstop. He put Kevin Twohey, the retired St. Helena fire chief, on payroll to train his vineyard workers on this equipment and advise on overall preparedness. 'I realized how important it was to have private firefighters,' he said. In the next few weeks, Chappellet will bring in sheep and goats to chomp down on flammable vegetation. Leasing the animals costs between $60,000 and $80,000, so he's looking into getting his own flock. 'Enhanced resilience areas' Individual properties like Chappellet Winery are also pooling their efforts, thanks in large part to the Napa Communities Firewise Foundation, a nonprofit whose goal is to make Napa County more resilient to wildfire. The foundation has been around since 2004, but the 2017 fires mobilized it in a new way. The foundation's budget, the result of funding from the county and private donations, rose from $100,000 to around $15 million per year. It went from supporting eight firesafe councils — small groups focused on specific neighborhoods — to 22. There's even more momentum now, said Firewise CEO Joe Nordlinger: 'The L.A. fires, in a perverse way, reactivated a lot of people's awareness around fire up here.' Firewise recently completed 265 fuel management projects, big jobs that involve removing flammable vegetation from fire-prone areas. The organization focuses on clearing county roads as well as the narrower access roads that lead up to ridgetops. The key element of this work, Nordlinger said, is bringing property owners together to create what he calls 'enhanced resilience areas.' His goal is to establish 150 such areas within the county. 'We have pretty good connective tissue to a lot of large land owners and winery owners,' Nordlinger said. Using lidar to survey the terrain, his group has drawn up a map of the county, resembling a patchwork quilt, that reflects each property's wildfire preparedness. The idea is that in a moment of crisis, Cal Fire could use the map to see which properties are defensible, where there are reservoirs of water and where there are cleared access roads. The county has become infinitely more sophisticated when it comes to fire in the last six years, Nordlinger said. 'There's better notification systems, we have access to more fixed-wing aircraft.' Most important, he said, residents are extremely vigilant and doing considerable work themselves. 'We're much better prepared, there's no question about it,' said Richard Mendelson, a Napa attorney and the author of the book 'Common Ground: Charting the Future of Napa Valley.' 'No one on their own can do this. It requires neighbors participating to the extent they can.' Next year, an Israeli company expects to launch a new technology in California vineyards that it's calling FireDome. Inspired by military missile-launch systems, the 'dome' will consist of balloon-like capsules propelled into the air filled with either water or a salt-based fire retardant. They would launch automatically upon sensing fire, said CEO Gadi Benjamini. It's not a literal dome, but 'by launching this 365 degrees around the property, we create a ground barrier,' he said. 'This prevents encroaching fires from entering the property.' FireDome is still in the development stage, but Benjamin said he is working with Napa Valley's Dalla Valle Vineyards as well as Sonoma County's Calligraphy Wines on the design and is projecting that a prototype will be ready by mid-2026. Ultimately, all the effort and expense in the world cannot prevent a wildfire. 'There's a lot of reasons why Napa County has taken such an aggressive position,' said Chappellet. 'We should be scared. It's a tinderbox of brush. When these fires happen, it reminds people that we're fragile.' 'If we're not prepared,' he continued, 'well, you can't prepare once the fire is here.'