CENTRAL POINT, Ore. — At first blush, the “smoking chamber” at Oregon State University’s Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center might look like your average garden hoop house, with plastic sheeting draped over a PVC frame.

In reality, the prototype was designed for a novel purpose — to simulate wildfire smoke in rows of winegrapes, allowing scientists to study the effects on finished wine.

Alec Levin, a viticulturist and associate professor at SOREC, is leading the experiment as part of a $7.65 million federal grant to researchers at three West Coast universities targeting smoke exposure on grapes and potential solutions for growers.

By next summer, Levin hopes to build five chambers over rows of Pinot noir at the research farm near Medford. Each will be fixed to a wood pellet grill piping in varying levels of smoke, replicating wildfire conditions.

Once the grapes are harvested, they can be tested for several types of organic compounds believed to contribute to “smoke taint” in wine.

Tainted wines have been described as having an unpleasant ashy or chemical taste, and worries over diminished quality can prompt wineries to reject grapes from vineyards inundated with wildfire smoke.

“As of late, we’ve had a lot of fires toward the later part of the summer and early fall,” Levin said. “Fire season is getting longer and longer.”

That observation was recently backed up by data from the state Department of Environmental Quality, which found the number of days with poor air quality due to wildfire smoke is increasing across the state.

Medford had 27 such days last year, the second-highest total on record dating back to 1985.

A team of scientists from OSU, Washington State University and the University of California-Davis is now working to solve the riddle of smoke taint and provide tools for the wine industry to adapt. Funding for the four-year study is provided by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

According to WineAmerica, an industry group based in Washington, D.C., winegrapes contribute $220 billion to the U.S. economy, with California, Washington and Oregon representing three of the top four wine-producing states.

Levin said he is still fine-tuning the smoking chamber to provide just the right amount of smoke concentration for his project.

“Our first few (trials) that we did, it got really smoky, really fast,” he said. “Where we’re at now, we need to figure out how to get a really low concentration of smoke that is more akin to what we’d have during a wildfire event.”

The plan, he said, is to begin collecting data next year. Each row of vines will be “smoked” twice per year, including once in early August at the onset of ripening and again 4-6 weeks later, just before harvest. Each time will be about eight hours overnight.

Levin said they will use Douglas fir pellets as the fuel source for smoke. They chose Pinot noir since it is Oregon’s signature variety, and as a thin-skinned red grape variety, it is highly susceptible to smoke taint.

“A lot of the problematic compounds that reduce wine quality are in the skins,” he said.

As if to underscore the urgency, Medford was awash in wildfire smoke earlier this year from three blazes burning just across the California border, including the 60,392-acre McKinney Fire and 7,886-acre Alex and Yeti fires.

Levin said his findings could help growers better determine which smoke levels are problematic, and when they should file a claim for crop insurance.

“We just don’t know what those thresholds are,” he said.

Other facets of the USDA grant across the three universities involve:

• Developing coatings for winegrapes to minimize or prevent uptake of compounds that contribute to smoke taint.

• Establishing low-cost sensors and sensor networks for real-time risk assessment in the vineyard.

• Optimizing a rapid small-batch fermentation method to predict what a wine impacted by smoke will taste like when fermented on a commercial scale.

“Because we have this huge group of researchers on this grant, everybody is taking a piece of the puzzle and working with it,” Levin said.