(SFChronicle) - On top of Moon Mountain, at the Gilfillan Vineyard, Scott Knippelmeir kneels to the ground, pulls off the outer layers of a grape vine’s loose wood, and cuts into its trunk. He’s checking for signs of life. If the trunk is green, that’s good: The vine is still alive. If it’s dry and coffee-brown, that means the vine is dead.

Sounds simple enough, except that there are nearly 12,000 individual grape vines at this 6.5-acre vineyard, and each one appears to have suffered a different fate in October’s Nuns Fire. “The destruction just seems so … random,” says Knippelmeir, Gilfillan’s vineyard manager.

Indeed, on this late December afternoon, Gilfillan, which is owned by Lambert Bridge Winery, looks simultaneously normal and macabre. Green grass has sprouted between vineyard rows, and the plants have shed their leaves, now bare and ready for winter’s hibernation. But next to healthy-looking vines are pockets of charred chaparral, blackened manzanitas, collapsed sheds. Melted irrigation hoses droop misshapenly toward the ground, as if in a Salvador Dali painting.