The cherished $13 billion Napa Valley wine industry in California is picking up the pieces after it was ravaged by a 6.0 magnitude earthquake Sunday that left winemakers scrambling to salvage their last remaining bottles of red and white.
“We’re wading around in a sea of Cabernet,” Henry Hill & Company wine warehouse owner Bill Hill told NBC News.
Hill said his company’s building — which housed nearly 1,000 barrels of wine, including the pricey and highly sought after Cabernet Sauvignon — felt the full brunt of the earthquake and suffered “severe” damages.
The epicenter of the earthquake was only six miles Southwest of Napa, which is home to approximately 430 wineries that contribute to an enormous industry with an annual economic impact of $50 billion, NBC News reports.
Hill added that nearly 20 percent of his wine had been lost, which will cost him “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“It’s devastating,” winemaker Tom Montgomery told the Associated Press. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Montgomery works at the B.R. Cohn Winery in Glen Ellen and says they suffered overwhelming wine losses that reached “as much as 50 percent.”
Loads of shattered bottles littered the floors of wineries as photos of the destruction made the rounds on social media sites Sunday revealing the shocking extent of the damage.
“There’s no question the loss to the wine industry around Napa is going to be significant,” Napa Antique Wine Artifacts owner Chris Griffith told NBC.
“We won’t be able to tally the total for weeks, if not months.”
The general manager at Cult 24 wine bar, Tyler Paradise, told Reuters that he believes they have lost around $50,000 worth of their product.
A single bottle of pinot noir worth $16,000 toppled over and crashed on the floor at Dahl Vineyards in Yountville, dumping it’s super-expensive contents on the floor below.
“It’s particularly disconcerting this time of year because we’re getting close to harvest and crush,” Adam Fox, managing director of Canard Vineyard in Calistoga told the L.A. Times.
“You can’t afford damage to your fermentation tank or water lines. If all your barrels came crashing, where are you going to get new ones in time?”
The earthquake comes as California battles the worst drought it’s seen in decades and winemakers who intended to start their 2014 harvest are now forced to shift their focus towards the massive cleanup.
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