Gallo won’t pursue Acampo processing facility

Gallo Winery has agreed not to pursue a use permit for a proposed 65acre processing facility in Acampo, Ag Community Alliance announced on its website this weekend.

In an email shared by the local advocacy group from Acampo, the winemaker indicated it would focus attention on a new site in Modesto instead.

“Recently the Seneca Foods property in Modesto became available and after evaluating its potential, we agreed to purchase the site. Therefore we no longer have a need to pursue a winery in Lodi at this time, and will be discontinuing our request for a use permit at our Liberty Winery site in Acampo,” a Gallo spokesperson told the group in an email sent Friday. “The Seneca Foods property is a great fit as it has the infrastructure and size to accommodate future growth when it is needed.”

A spokesperson for E. & J. Gallo Winery confirmed the decision not to proceed with the Liberty Winery site in Acampo on Monday.

The news was greeted with relief by members of the Ag Community Alliance, many of them neighbors of the proposed site.

The group was formed to oppose the planned winery near Peltier and East Acampo roads.

“THANK YOU Gallo for listening to your neighbors and taking to heart the concerns of the community!” the group posted on its website, www.agcommunityalliance.com, this weekend. “As we have stated many times, this was not an effort to thwart Gallo of their expansion needs; rather this was an effort to preserve rural character of agricultural community.”

Neighbors of the proposed project first aired their concerns at a meeting with the winery in May, raising concerns over how the facility might affect traffic, how noise and lighting would be handled, and how the winery would impact local groundwater.

“E. & J. Gallo is to be commended for deciding to keep this beautiful, prime Acampo farmland, among which so many families reside, in vineyards. We personally want to thank all persons that had a part in Gallo’s decision to locate their new huge winery in an already-existing industrial location in Modesto,” neighbors Lloyd and Jill Martel told the News-Sentinel in an email. “This should be a wake-up call to everyone within the Lodi grape-growing district that a new category of winery size needs to be considered, and appropriate ordinances of location need to be put in place, in order to preserve the beauty and desirability of this entire region.”

But others in the community were more supportive of the project. The Lodi facility could have cut shipping costs for some of the local growers that supply grapes to Gallo.

The project was also expected to bring 78 year-round and 100 harvest season jobs to Lodi, a Gallo spokesman told the News-Sentinel in December 2017.

The number of jobs was expected to increase in later phases of the project, Greg Coleman, Gallo’s vice president of grower relations, told attendees of the meeting in May.

“Any Chamber of Commerce gets excited about hundreds of new jobs,” Lodi Chamber of Commerce President Pat Patrick said.

Gallo also buys a large number of grapes from Lodi growers, he added.

“Certainly Gallo was within their rights as they owned the land and would have complied with the wine ordinance guidelines as they are written today,” he said.

While the move by Gallo was a complex decision, Patrick said, this gives rural residents in the Lodi area the chance to think about what they want for their communities moving forward, and city residents as well, he said.

“Should these extra-large sized wineries fit in between small and boutique wineries that dot our rural landscape?” he asked. “Or should they be in a zone where truck traffic is the norm and 24-hour, 1,000-acre production facilities don’t have small farmers and country homes across the street?”

Regardless of how the city and county move ahead, there needs to be some focus on attracting new jobs to the city and surrounding community, Patrick added.