Planning a trip to California's wine country has recently gotten much more complicated than researching which wineries bottle the best Cabernet Sauvignon.
Since early October, strong winds—some even registering at hurricane force—have blown through Northern California, leading local utility company Pacific Gas & Electric to preemptively shut off power lines so that dry brush and trees won't be blown onto the lines and ignite wildfires. More than 500,000 PG&E customers had their power shut off on Tuesday, October 29, following a widespread outage over the weekend that left 2 million people without power in the region, including in Napa and Sonoma counties and others in the San Francisco Bay Area. (The city of San Francisco has not been impacted by the power outages.) These intentional power outages—partly driven by the hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change—are a phenomenon that won't be ending in California any time soon.
PG&E's corporate parent company has said these intentional blackouts will likely occur throughout the area for at least the next decade. The corporation's CEO, Bill Johnson, has said it will likely take 10 years before the outages have "really ratcheted down significantly," according to NPR.
Though the outages are causing chaos for residents, experts in the region say a vacation to Northern California is still possible, as long as travelers have up-to-the-minute information. "Now more than ever, my advice would be really rely on a concierge expert that is in the area that can give you advice by the minute," says Ania Gatto, a Condé Nast Traveler travel specialist who runs the company Wine Trip Concierge. "I would lean on the locals that are here and experiencing all of this first hand."
Her current on-the-ground advice is that large swaths of the state's wine region are still safe for travelers. "Napa Valley continues being safe to travel," Gatto says. "The northern town of Calistoga, they've done an [advisory] evacuation. However, as far as I know, most of the town is still operating," she says, noting that towns south of Calistoga, like St. Helena, Yountville, and the town of Napa are also currently up and running for visitors, too. "Right now, I'm still recommending my clients to come to Napa."
In Sonoma County, the massive 74,000-acre Kincade fire is now 80 percent contained as of November 4, and officials hope to have it totally extinguished by Thursday, November 7. About 200,000 people were forced to evacuate the area, but some places were still left untouched by fires, including Healdsburg, Forestville, Dry Creek Valley, Sebastopol, Sonoma, Kenwood, Glen Ellen, Santa Rosa, and Cloverdale.
Gatto‘s advice for tourists to the wine region going forward: If blackouts or wildfires ruin your planes, still come but go to a different part of California.
"Maybe come to Napa if you already have your flight booked," she says. "Remember, this is the beauty of Northern California: If you fly into San Francisco or Sacramento, if the air quality is not great or there is a fire danger in Sonoma or Napa, you have the chance of going down to Carmel Valley, [or] we can rebook you at Big Sur. Everything is within, like, a two-and-a-half-hour drive. You could drive up to Tahoe and have a great time there. There are amazing options that might not be quite what you were looking for—not a wine country getaway—but you still get the beauty of Northern California."
If you already have a Northern California trip planned, contact your hotel in advance to see if they are impacted by the outages—and whether they have a backup generator that will allow them to stay up and running during future blackout periods.
For those able to salvage a trip to Napa, Sonoma, or the surrounding areas, one safe bet is to plan visits to wineries, where libations are bottled on-site, because the majority of those venues will have a backup generator. "Most wineries will have an on-demand generator if they're making wine on-site, and that is because they cannot afford for their fermentation tanks to change temperatures, or need their cooling zones in the barrels in storage to stay at temperature," Gatto explains. "Wineries are actually a great, great thing to visit, actually, because they will be up and running, as normal."
Despite the extensive power outages, reports say that the utility company's lines are likely responsible for at least two smaller fires that started Sunday in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a PG&E transmission tower is also reported to have malfunctioned near the origin of the Kincade fire, though the exact cause of that conflagration are still under investigation.
"It is kind of a wait-and-see situation," Gatto says, but despite the blackouts, most of wine country is operating as normally as possible. "The grapes still have to get picked and be trucked into the wineries; they still have to be pressed," she says. "We still have vineyard crews that are working around the clock. Just because of the fire [it] doesn't mean the industry is [at] a hard stop."
And according to Gatto, the same spirit goes for the rest of the region's tourism industry. "Everyone in both valleys is working around the clock," she says. "Hotels—especially the really high-end, small boutique ones—are putting in on-demand generators and having a backup plan. There's no such thing as [no] backup plan around here these days. You can't afford for there not to be anymore."
This story was originally published in October 2019. It has been updated with new information.
