(LATimes) - Some effects of a wildfire are visually arresting. Others are invisible, dormant for months, and then, suddenly, smellable. You may not have heard of it yet, but winemakers fear its name: smoke taint.

There are a lot of ways wines can go wrong. Maybe you’ve had a corked wine, where a fungus-exposed cork imparts a musty off-flavor like a dank basement. Smoke taint rears its head when grapes, kissed by environmental smoke as they’re growing, eventually yield a wine with unexpected smoldering flavors.

Those of us who enjoy mezcal or smoky amari might be intrigued — smoky wine sounds, potentially, like a new undiscovered natural wine trend. But smoke-tainted wine is less Laphroaig-writ-grapes and more like drinking from a well-used ashtray, with overpowering old-campfire and cigarette smoke flavors, according to Anita Oberholster, a cooperative extension specialist in enology at UC Davis who studies the phenomenon.