I believe that only pertains to a few of the salvias, native to CA.

Mother Nature sometimes has cleansing fires in the desert areas of southern California, leaving the landscape barren. The smoke from the fire triggers germination of species that quickly regenerate growth in the burnt-out area. Some Salvia ant Trichostema species respond this way.

For sages from other areas, giberellic acid (GA-3) is probably a better first choice.

It just helps in getting a higher germination rate, which is critical for the nursery grower. For the home gardener it simply means over-plant your seed flats if you don't have liquid smoke or some other stimulant. GA3 can help with CA native sages too and so can 3% peroxide for an hour, or immersion in 200 degree F water and allowed to sit overnight before planting in flats or in situ. This last method is the one that's allowed me to best germinate open-pollinated S. mellifera, S. apiana, S. clevelandii and S. spathacea. I boil the water and then let I it cool to that temp. The seed coat while get gelatinous and make the seeds sticky for handling, so I use toothpicks or popsickle sticks to handle them.

I'm not familiar with your climate, but in CA we would typically germinate in Sept/Oct or in early spring. Rooting cuttings in spring is about as easy as growing from seed, I find. If you are going to just wintersow, I'd say no treatment is necessary, but you better have a lot of seed to toss out. Anything you start now will likely struggle through the winter unless you have a greenhouse or growing set-up with heat and w/o too much humidity. You would really have to baby them until it's warm enough for you to plant out.

Of the sages native here...
Salvia apiana
Salvia brandegeei
Salvia carduacea
Salvia clevelandii
Salvia columbariae
Salvia dorrii
Salvia eremostachya
Salvia funerea
Salvia greatae Brandegee
Salvia leucophylla
Salvia mellifera
Salvia mohavensis
Salvia munzii
Salvia pachyphylla
Salvia sonomensis
Salvia spathacea
Salvia vaseyi
Salvia verbenacea

I'd say vaseyi, eremostachya, pachyphylla, mohavensis, and funerea probably won't grow for you and the rest of them will die if allowed to sit in water and get any sort of rot. Planting on a slope will help with that.

Thanks for the info Dicot. I only wintersow seeds of plants that are perennial, biennial, or hardy annuals. HHAs I usually sow around late February to March. Tenders are sown in April. This is a pretrty good rule of thumb to follow when wintersowing. I am just a beginner so I don't know much yet about Salvias other than those that are heavily promoted and in many cases, over planted (like the so-called bedding Salvias) that you find at the big box stores by the gazillions, generally without tags (one of my pet peeves).

I have done, and continue to do research on Salvia species and have a list of reds I am going to plant. I grow a number of native plants for butterflies and hummers. Until I came to this forum, I had no idea there so many Salvias.

Another Salvia I am going to add to my list (darcyi, miniata, coccinea, regla) is roehmeria (?) which is Texas native that may reseed, but I will collect as much as possible.

I doubt I will use any treatment on the seeds at all and leave it to Mother Nature and pray a lot.

You're in LA so you probably have pretty mild temps. Oklahoma City is in zone 7a, but we experience a lot of extremes. In winter we can be 20 deg one day and 70 the next. Sometimes our winters are mild and zone 8 plants will winter over fine. Right now it is very cold - high 30s and 40s with lows in the 20s. Brrrr! Summers can be awful, with stretches of 100+ temps for a couple of months and high humidity (we get it from the southern coast). The ground, however, rarely freezes.

Susan