Adjacent vines at Gilfillan Vineyard look completely different: In some cases, a vine’s rootstock is dead, but the canes at its top still have moist green tissue. Singed leaves don’t necessarily mean a singed plant. One wooden shed at Gilfillan burned; nearby, another stands intact. The most flammable spot in the entire vineyard — where a gas grill and propane tank stand underneath a huge pine tree — is, miraculously, unmarred.
What saved Gilfillan? The cover crop had been mowed, for one thing, so there wasn’t much brush between the vine rows to catch fire. There weren’t weeds growing around the base of each plant. The posts bookending the trellises are metal, not wood.
Ultimately, though, no one has a good answer for why one vine burned and another didn’t. The aftermath of the North Bay Fires has exposed how little we understand about the nexus of fire and vines. Read more here, from the San Francisco Chronicle.