Looser rules asked for tasting rooms
Vintners beseech Napa supervisors for relief
Nine Napa Valley vintners are asking Napa County to ease restrictions on tasting rooms, claiming that their community needs more tourism in order to recover from the economic hardship of the pandemic and recent wildfires. Their request comes as one of the county’s temporary relief measures is about to expire.
The group, which calls itself Coalition Napa Valley, presented a letter to the county’s Board of Supervisors on Tuesday afternoon asking for “emergency relief” measures, including lifting the appointmentonly requirement for tasting rooms and allowing wineries to remain open to visitors until 7 p. m. They propose that these changes last until 2023.
“The pandemic and the double whammy of wildfires has put us in an unprecedented place,” said coalition member Harvest Duhig, who owns a vineyard and small wine label, Duhig Wines, with her husband. “We’re asking for flexibility.”
Tom Davies, president of V. Sattui Winery, said that his visitation was down 55% from last year, a significant hit to his overall business. When people aren’t visiting wineries, he added, the rest of Napa Valley’s economy suffers, too, including restaurants, hotels and shops.
Napa County, which moved into the orange tier of California’s reopening plan on Wednesday, has had 1,888 confirmed coronavirus infections and 13 deaths, the lowest numbers of any Bay Area county. The local
economy is heavily dependent on tourism, supporting 16,000 jobs and generating $ 2.23 billion in spending at local businesses in a typical year, according to Visit Napa Valley. Much of that tourism revolves around visits to winery tasting rooms.
But the growth of tourism has also been a point of major controversy for Napa residents. Numerous community groups have arisen in recent years to resist the expansion of wineries, hotels and other touristcentric businesses, claiming that the influx of visitors has harmed residents’ quality of life and that the wine industry, by developing wineries and vineyards in rural, forested areas, has endangered the environment. The pandemic adds yet another layer of complexity to these debates, since some locals fear that visitors could bring the coronavirus into Napa Valley.
The current landscape in Napa is the result of many years of compromise between these two factions. Most Napa County wineries have more restrictive use permits than wineries in other counties, including Sonoma, limiting the number of visitors they can host per week, for example, and whether they’re allowed to have walkin customers.
The letter’s signatories include Dario Sattui of Castello di Amorosa and Chuck Wagner of Caymus Vineyards, two of Napa’s most popular tourist destinations, along with owners of smaller wineries like Julie Arbuckle of Anthem Winery and Stu Smith of SmithMadrone Vineyards. ( In addition to running her family business, Duhig is also an employee at Caymus.)
The immediate impetus for this letter is a looming expiration date for some temporary relief measures that the county adopted in May. Then, the Board of Supervisors enacted a resolution that permitted, among other things, all tasting rooms to host visitors outdoors, even if their normal permits didn’t allow for that. It also required that all wineries move to reservationonly tastings, including those whose use permits allow walkgroup’s in visitors in nonpandemic times. That resolution is set to expire on Oct. 31.
But Coalition Napa Valley is demanding more than simply an extension of those relief measures. It also asks the county to reverse some of its longstanding rules for wineries, some of which have been in place since 1990. Specifically, Duhig said, the position is that wineries should be subject to the same regulations as other types of businesses in the county.
“Some wineries have permits that allow them four visitors a week,” said Duhig, whose wine brand does not have a tasting room. That’s not a sustainable business model, she argued. Instead, wineries’ visitation privileges should be based on infrastructure, she said: parking, septic systems, fire codes.
Duhig’s employer, Wagner of Caymus, made a similar argument in a lawsuit he filed against Gov. Gavin Newsom in May, claiming that the state was discriminating against wineries by not allowing them to reopen.
Davies, of V. Sattui, called these longstanding restrictions on wineries archaic. The coalition’s letter, for example, says that requiring winery appointments does not do much in the way of restricting traffic to the valley anymore, since more people now have cell phones than in 1990 and just make their appointments once they’ve already arrived in the area.
“The times have changed but the rules have not,” he said.
The proposed extension of these relief measures into 2023 is partly to account for the lengthy economic recovery period that will be required after the pandemic and the wildfires.
“Our industry is going to be hurting for years,” Davies said. During his 41 years at V. Sattui, he’s experienced earthquakes, droughts, floods and fires, and he said that the lingering assumption that the entire valley has been overtaken by natural disaster has tended to depress tourism rates for long periods of time.
“For the most part, the valley is unharmed, yet the perception is that we’re all burned up,” Davies said, referring to the recent Glass Fire.
It was not clear Tuesday afternoon whether the Napa County Board of Supervisors intended to take action in response to Coalition Napa Valley’s letter.