I know so little of what is going on and none of it first hand. I was on a sales trip to Washington DC when I woke up at 6 AM to a text from a friend on the east side of Napa. She knew that my home was very close to the center of the Atlas fire that had exploded over night. It was the first I heard about the fires.

I am still on the East Coast. Our home, like many others, has been evacuated. For now, I am staying out of the way. But I can still fill you in.

The first thing that you need to know is that this report is accurate up to about 8:30 PM Pacific on Thursday, October 12. The next thing that you need to know is the situation could change at any moment, but neither randomly nor unpredictably. Everything at the moment now depends on the wind. The wind is roughly predictable, and the predictions at the moment are for calm, unthreatening winds until Saturday morning. This means that we really do not expect anything to change until Saturday morning at the soonest. There are several fires, and each has a different profile. None of them are more than very slightly contained; several are uncontained. The ones in the north and west are in general more active at the moment; the Atlas fire, south and east and closer to Napa and Fairfield, is at the moment mostly quiet and not spreading, except for a small amount of fresh burning on its very northern and southern margins. As I write, a friend alerts me that Pritchard Hill started burning again, nearly in the center, but this is the exception.

The burning that erupted Sunday night reached a crescendo near the town of Napa sometime early Tuesday morning. The photo above was taken by my friend Eden Monday night, looking over the Napa river, from the town of Napa to the hills in the East where the fire started. And where my house is. I have two roommates; we call our place "Swan Lake." They evacuated Monday morning. Our house is still standing and at the moment it is not in danger. That could change quickly if the winds pick up—but if they do not, there is no active burning near enough to threaten it. At its peak, the fire got within 500 meters of the house. We feel so lucky, so grateful. Julia and Meghan keep chickens; they have returned twice, in respirators, to evacuate the chickens too.

Tuesday was truly terrible. There was so much smoke, the air so heavy with particles, that no one saw the sky for two days. The sun was only ever an angry flaming orb, so obscured that you could look right at it. Even where nothing had been burned, everything was a Pompeeian gray, covered in ash and without normal edges. What looked like a paradise Sunday afternoon now looked like tableau of the end of of the world. I am not even speaking of the truly unthinkable devastation of Santa Rosa—I mean Napa, where the town has suffered no destruction.

I think that no one knew what the fires were going to do Tuesday night. Fresh fires had erupted in the hills on the south end of Napa and burned so furiously that we did not expect our home to survive; and all Napa now felt threatened. But somehow the winds were quelled and the fires burned but did not spread. I think that everyone on our side of the valley woke Wednesday full of hope that there would be no more destruction; no more night skies lit with burning mountains.

And indeed, our home was safe, but I was also watching the home of the Tenbrinks, our dear friends and colleagues who built and own the winery where we make our wine. They live east of Napa, in Suisun Valley, on the other side of the ridge where the fire had started Sunday night. The fire never threatened the eastern flank of the hills; it had risen to the top of the ridge and stopped, without spilling down toward the Tenbrinks—and our winery.

We all knew that this could change quickly; the whole side of the mountain was nothing but dry brush. If the wind changed, the fire would consume the whole slope in an instant, and the fire would be in the valley.

I was in touch with their daughter Lisa, who had first alerted me to the fire, and she was feeling good Wednesday morning, that the mountain would be a barrier that protected them. But by noon, the winds had picked up and were blowing straight east; suddenly the fire was marching, like an army, toward the homes of the Tenbrinks, their children, and our winery. I felt sick. By mid-day, they had all evacuated and were bivouaced at the winery. We could not even be sure that the winery would be their last stop. At dusk, as the wind began to drop, the edge of the fire was 1 mile from the parents' home and 5 miles from the winery. At the beginning of the day, the fire had been in another county.

We woke up this morning with the borders of the fire unchanged, and it was burning down. Not moving, not raging. The fire maps all over our part of Napa and the Tenbrinks' side of the mountain showed nearly no new activity. Today was a normal day at the winery; with three generations of winegrowers pressing Petite Sirah under a sunny, blue sky.

Not everyone has been so lucky; you already know that. I do not pretend to offer a general report, and do not want to speak for friends or colleagues without their permission—I am writing only to report on a narrow world. I must tell you that Brenna's family lost their home on the very first day of the fire and were evacuated only in the midst of peril and with only moments to spare. They lost everything, including a lifetime of art. Brenna's own home, miles away, is by chance threatened even now by one of the Sonoma fires. Send her and her family your thoughts and wishes. And you know how to reach her.

Two other friends have lost the family homes in which they grew up, historical and ancient. But no one has been hurt. Some vineyards nearby have been damaged; none that I know of have been destroyed. Guman was unharmed when last seen; Farina is in a zone so dangerous that even the vineyard manager does not know its state one way or another. It is in Glen Ellen where there was terrible havoc in the woods and vineyards. We know that local residents and remarkable Calfire heroes saved other vineyards nearby; we can hope.

I am telling you only about the people and places closest to me. And only what I know—there is so much that is terrible that is still unknown, not yet uncovered.

Now, it is all about the wind. It is so interesting that our fates, in some way our happiness, is tied to something invisible and utterly uncontrollable. A fire break means nothing if the wind gusts to 50 knots again.

I was thinking about the nebulous and sometimes mystical terroir that is so important for us to understand—and I was thinking how we do indeed take wind into account, that we surely understand wind and air-flow patterns with care and precision as we think about our vineyards. The flow of air is certainly part of terroir. But we think about it in connection with frost damage and protection, and the threat and mitigation of various molds and mildews, and in relation to the ripening of the fruit—but we don't often think about how the channels of air flow can be canals of destruction; how the invisible, but hardly silent, movement of air could be the most monstrous bringer of doom. That canyon wall, that gulley—could determine everything.

Here are some tools that I have found useful (and check obsessively):