Wine Country fires put a temporary crimp in weddings

Calistoga native Brittany Brown, who had a schoolgirl crush on one of her older brother’s buddies, Michael Norman, fell in love for real six years ago, after she’d graduated from college, volunteered in India and reconnected with him over dinner with mutual friends.

The pair were engaged in May. Brown, now 30 and the athletic director at Pacific Union College in Angwin, and Norman, 35, a sheet metal worker, made plans to wed Oct. 14 at Hans Fahden Vineyards in Calistoga, owned by the groom’s stepfather. The weekend before, they prepped the wedding site — clearing brush and trimming trees at an overlook never previously used for a wedding, with views of the hills of Sonoma County.

Two hours after they finished, the Wine Country fires broke out. As flames caused terrifying damage throughout both counties, and burned much of Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park and homes in nearby Fountaingrove, Larkfield and Skyfarm to the ground, the wedding venue went up in smoke. The winery was threatened as well.

The wedding reception was to have been at the bride’s mother’s home on Tubbs Lane, but those plans were canceled, too, when the Tubbs Fire spread and the home was evacuated in the middle of the week. Some of the bridal party sought refuge at the home of a longtime family friend in Napa, outside the fire zone. The best man’s property burned down. And rescheduling to the following weekend was not an option for Brown, as it coincided with the fourth anniversary of her father’s death.

Thwarted, the couple wondered what to do, as the trauma of family members fighting to preserve the winery, and of friends losing their homes, hung heavy in their hearts.

They weren’t the only ones feeling that way.

September and October are the busiest months of the year for weddings and celebrations in Napa and Sonoma counties, and many people with events scheduled when the fires broke out were faced with a dilemma: whether to proceed in the face of loss — or reschedule, costing themselves and their guests financial losses in the form of hotel and airline cancellations, and vendor and venue contracts.

Exact figures on how many weddings and other milestone celebrations were disrupted by the Wine Country fires were not immediately available, but calls to tourism officials, caterers and hotels in Napa and Sonoma counties indicated the number was significant. (Neither county specifically tracks wedding spending as a percentage of annual tourist spending, but spending on group meetings, including weddings, totaled $196 million in Napa County in 2016.)

“There’s a considerable difference in what we used to see and what we’re seeing this year,” said Jonny Westom, executive director of the Sonoma Valley Visitors Bureau. Many hotel rooms, he said, were occupied by evacuees, insurance agents and personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Most of the fire damage in Sonoma County occurred in rural areas — 10 percent of the county’s 1 million acres, according to Charmaine Louzao of Sonoma County Tourism, another visitors group. The Paradise Ridge Winery, a popular wedding venue, and the Sonoma Hilton were lost, but 95 percent of the county’s wineries are open for business, she noted.

Similarly, in Napa Valley, the fires burned predominantly in forested hillsides, while the Napa Valley floor, located between Highway 29 and the Silverado Trail, “saw little to no impact,” said Angela Jackson of Visit Napa Valley, a tourism organization. She added that just four of the valley’s 400 wineries were closed due to fire damage and none of its hotels burned.

Auberge du Soleil, a luxury resort in Rutherford, moved three on-site weddings the weekend of Oct. 14, one of them to Half Moon Bay. Wedding planner Laurie Arons relocated a Napa Valley wedding to Atherton, while caterer Paula LeDuc moved one Napa Valley wedding to a private residence in Napa and another to San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

A week later, two separate weddings for 200 guests — one at Campovida organic farm and winery in Hopland (Mendocino County) and other at Charles Krug in St. Helena — proceeded as planned, said Cara Hanson, an executive with Elaine Bell Catering, which was hired for the events. By then, the air quality had improved, a key factor in moving forward, she said, noting, “Both couples, however, took a gamble and decided after much debate and sleepless nights to remain at those venues and continue on with their weddings.”

Other corporate and community events hung in the balance. Robb Report, a luxury lifestyle magazine, went ahead with its 15th annual Car of the Year event at Meadowood Oct. 27-Nov. 10 after ensuring that the hotel — which had been evacuated — was open, that streets were clear and that air quality was good. Some 100 guests paid up to $12,500 each to test-drive luxury cars and attend private dinners. To assist the Napa & Sonoma Relief Fund, celebrity chefs were paired — as drivers — with guests who paid up to $15,000 each to sit as a passenger out on the road, garnering $100,000 in the effort. “The best thing we could do to help Napa Valley get back to business,” said David Arnold, managing director of Robb Report, “was to return.”

Jordan Winery canceled its mid-October Halloween party to make hotel rooms available for evacuees and first responders, and Rutherford’s Alpha Omega Winery canceled its annual Harvest Dinner on Oct. 14, and at the request of some ticket holders, donated some refunds to Operation BBQ Relief’s efforts to provide 30,000 meals to emergency responders. (The winery aims to raise $100,000 from its Dec. 10 Holiday Giving Party and next year’s two Big Bottle Benefit events for the Napa Valley Community Foundation’s Disaster Relief Fund and the Rutherford Volunteer Fire Department.)

The Oct. 21 nuptials of Redwood City’s Ninni Sonberg, 30, who works at a Bay Area startup, and Andrew Vanni, 30, who owns a contracting company, were touch and go at Calistoga’s Solage resort, which was evacuated on Oct. 11 and reopened just two days before their wedding. (A groomsman was a first responder to the fires.)

“After hearing the news, our hearts hurt — they hurt for those affected, for those lost and for the possibility of not being able to celebrate our wedding as we’d originally planned,” said Sonberg, by email.

But as the fires were contained, and rain fell, plans to relocate proved unnecessary.

“We had the wedding of our dreams,” Sonberg said, “and could not be more grateful to all those who made it possible.”

Brown and Norman chose to move forward with the cycle of life by marrying on Oct. 14. The ceremony, smaller than originally planned, took place in the backyard of the home of their friend in Napa, real estate agent Hanan Kim, with 30 guests attending. Brown’s aunt from North Carolina registered to become a legal officiant, a designer from San Francisco brought flowers and tableware, and a neighbor cooked and served Mexican food.

“It felt funny to do an elaborate, last-minute wedding when some people couldn’t make it,” Brown said. “It was intimate and sweet, heavy and joyful at the same time. It wasn’t perfect. There were people we wish who could be there who couldn’t. But what do they say? Love prevails.”

Carolyne Zinko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: czinko@sfchronicle.com