Napa’s Wineries Battle Local Restrictions
In 1976, at the now-famous Judgment of Paris, California wines took top prize over the French wines in a cross-Atlantic tasting competition. The outcome shocked the global wine world—especially given that the judges of the event were French—and tourists began to flock to Napa Valley. A decade later, in 1986, California passed the country’s first direct-to-consumer wine shipping law, allowing wines to be shipped directly from vineyards to doorsteps.
Since then, the Napa Valley wine juggernaut has appeared unstoppable. But now the Napa County government itself is strangling the very businesses that put the region on the map.
This saga actually predates the famous triumph in Paris. In 1968, the Napa Agriculture Preserve was created to prioritize agricultural zoning and ward off development. In 1990, Napa County implemented a Winery Definition Ordinance that laid out requirements for winery operations, including that wineries obtain a use permit.
In order to host tastings, wineries must have an on-site “wine production facility,” which brings with it a host of additional requirements, such as parking rules and a price tag of up to $5 million to build. This obviously advantages the large, corporate wineries in Napa Valley that can readily afford such outlays. To even the playing field, already existing small wineries at the time of the 1990 ordinance were exempted from having to obtain a use permit under a grandfathering clause.
These small wineries understood their exemption to allow for on-site wine tastings—and conducted such tastings for decades—only to be informed within the last few years by county officials that tastings were actually prohibited. One winery was sued by the county for engaging in such allegedly nefarious activities as hosting tastings, hanging up decorative lights, and conducting yoga classes on-site (the county ran a sting on the winery using “secret shoppers”). Other wineries simply found out via a county database of wineries, which was apparently changed without any notice being provided, thereby silently altering the approved operations of over 20 wineries.
As one Napa winemaker, who has hosted tastings since the ’70s, told Wine Spectator: “Now, 48 years later, without my being notified or being allowed to be present to defend my rights, the county arbitrarily and capriciously changed my permitting to zero visitors a day….I only
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