During the COVID-19 pandemic, wineries in the Sonoma area have been struggling with restrictions and the new ways of doing businesses, but Ken Freeman, proprietor at Freeman Vineyard and Winery, said his winery is doing well given the circumstances.
"Well, it's been a challenge for everybody in our industry. But fortunately, we're doing, you know, we're doing well considering," he told Golden State Today. "So we are able to host guests at our winery, and that has been been a lot of visitors. So we don't have international visitors and we don't have that many from out of state, but we have a lot of visitors from the Bay Area, which is wonderful."
Not only has the winery industry been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, but they are also being affected by the wildfires in the area. This is the fifth year in a row that fires have impacted the industry. It has also impacted the tourism in the area, which wineries greatly depend on.
"We are never directly threatened by a fire," Freeman told Golden State Today. "But the smoke damage of this year has been very challenging that we lost 50% of our crop. So we didn't harvest, but besides that, you know, doing better than most."
Freeman said they made the decision not to harvest 50% of their crop because he didn't want to risk them being damaged by the smoke. He said luckily the closest fire to the winery was 20 miles away, but they have still impacted all the wineries in the area.
"Well, the fires have been a real challenge on top of you know COVID-19 which affected the business all of our businesses," Freeman told Golden State Today. "I think similar to other wineries that have hospitality and have visitors coming, so, you know, the smoke was was not good because people didn't come up to visit."
Many other wineries also lost part of their harvests this year in addition to the loss of tourism due to the coronavirus and the fires.
While many wineries have been greatly impacted by the pandemic and fires, Freeman said he is lucky his business is still doing fairly well.
"We're fortunate that we've had an increase in direct to consumer shipments of our wine," he told Golden State Today. "So, even in light of fires and in light of COVID-19, small wineries that are making handcrafted special wine, you know, business, we've been able to pivot and people were drinking more at home."
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