It was late on Sunday evening when Ray Signorello realized something was wrong. His wife Tanya, had spotted flames coming down the hillside towards their Napa Valley wine estate.
The first warning came at 10.45pm - less than an hour later, the winery building containing the family home was on fire and the Signorellos had fled.
By Monday morning, nothing was left of the colonnaded winery building but a blackened heap of rubble dotted with exploded glass bottles, while a formerly picturesque stretch of olive trees on the hill behind had been badly burned.
‘The fire was fueled by 50mph winds so there wasn’t much to stop it,’ Signorello, 54, told DailyMail.com.
‘Fortunately we didn’t have anybody injured here – that’s the most important thing.’
The 40-year-old Signorello Estate, which produces between 5,000 and 6,000 cases of wine each year, is one of 16 wineries wrecked by the monster blazes that have ravaged northern California over the past week.
My heart hurts so bad for these people. There are a lot of old line families that have small vineyards that are totally destroyed.
What they need is a tax increase to fix it.