Oregon Wildfire Smoke Hit Wine Sales and Tasting Rooms

The fire season may end. The financial aftershocks can last longer. A new study of Oregon’s 2020 wildfire season finds that smoke exposure was associated with lower wine sales over the following years—and fewer people walking into tasting rooms while smoky conditions were still fresh.

The study, published October 15 in the Journal of Wine Economics, examined smoke exposure around Oregon wineries and tracked retail sales and tasting room activity. The researchers estimate that a one-standard-deviation increase in September fine-particle pollution (PM2.5) was associated with retail wine sales volume declines of 15% to 23% across the following three years. Those yearly estimates were imprecise, however, and reached conventional statistical significance only in 2023. The effect was most pronounced for Pinot Noir and Pinot Grigio, two of Oregon’s leading varieties. Read Sugiyama and Sterns’ study.

There was a more immediate hit, too. A one-standard-deviation rise in smoke exposure was associated with 5.8% declines in tasting room sales and visitor counts in the following month. Direct-to-consumer sales fell by 2.7%. That pattern fits an ordinary human response: when the air looks or smells bad, people cancel, postpone, or rethink a wine-country visit.

The paper is careful about what the numbers can and cannot say. It studies the 2020 Oregon fires and uses variation in smoke exposure across winery locations; it does not claim that every lost retail sale came from smoke-tainted wine. The authors point to several possible channels, including concern about wine quality and fewer visitors, and leave a fuller explanation for future research.

That distinction matters. Smoke can reach a winery through the grapes, but also through the road to the tasting room. The study puts numbers to both kinds of pressure: a possible longer retail-sales shadow and a sharper drop in hospitality business right after smoke events.

The featured NASA image shows thick smoke streaming from fires in Oregon and California on September 9, 2020, captured by the Terra satellite. NASA Earth Observatory image and caption.

For Oregon wine, the lesson is larger than one vintage: wildfire smoke can threaten the product and the visit that helps sell it. The study’s estimates are not a forecast for every fire or winery, but they give producers a clearer picture of how quickly poor air can reach the tasting room—and how its sales effects may not vanish when the skies clear.

Related Viniside stories: Ancient DNA traces Iberian wine grapes to the Eastern Mediterranean · Five wine grapes face crown gall · A medieval grape seed’s Pinot Noir connection.

Primary source: Amod Sugiyama and James A. Sterns, “When smoke signals economic loss: How wildfires harm Oregon wineries,” Journal of Wine Economics, published October 15, 2026 · DOI 10.1017/jwe.2026.10122.