San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Has Wine Country become too expensive for its own good?
One thing became very clear over the course of this year: Visiting Wine Country has gotten really expensive.
How expensive? Staying in a hotel in Yountville for one night in June would have cost you $934 on average — $200 more than the year prior. Booking an “elevated” wine tasting in Napa Valley cost, on average, $82.26 per person, as opposed to $30 six years ago. These were among the eyepopping statistics that my colleague Jess Lander and I discovered in our reporting this year.
Of course, it’s not just Wine Country. Everything’s getting more expensive these days, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed at the gas pump and the grocery checkout line. Prices overall in the Bay Area were 6% higher in October than the previous year, the Consumer Price Index shows.
But it’s worth pausing to consider the particular implications of these exploding costs in Napa and Sonoma, which were already marching toward higher-end — or, as the wine industry likes to say, “premium” — goods and services. These are places with complicated, maybe even contradictory, relationships to luxury: Wineries deliberately cultivate rarefied auras, depend on tourism and by nature cater to customers with disposable income. Yet simultaneously, Wine Country has always prided itself on being a farming community, a place built on humble multigenerational family businesses. As Jess and I were reminded many times this year, this community seriously bristles at any implications of elitism.
This contradiction, if not new, came under a glaring light in 2022. And it may soon become untenable for Wine Country.
Readers often write to us with nostalgic recollections of going wine tasting in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, when tastings were free or, at most, $5. I wasn’t in the Bay Area in those days, but I’ve witnessed monumental changes in just the last decade.
I moved to Napa in 2011 for a harvest internship at a winery. I found a cheap room to rent on Craigslist, and when I showed up, it was my first time setting foot in Napa Valley. Everything here was new and amazing to me: the endless expanse of vineyards as I drove up the Silverado Trail; the taste of a ripe, bitterskinned berry off the vine; the melty carnitas in the tacos at La Luna Market. (We did not have carnitas like that in Massachusetts.)
Every chance we got, my fellow harvest interns and I would go tasting at other wineries. This almost never required a reservation, and was usually free for us, since wineries tended to comp the tastings of other local industry folks. Most tasting rooms back then were mere rooms, the sort of places where you’d sidle up to a bar and chat casually with the staff while they poured a series of small samples. You never needed to plan ahead for this — you just started driving and pulled off wherever looked interesting. That’s how I tasted my way up and down Highway 29 and all through Healdsburg’s Westside Road.
Once, I had out-of-town friends visiting, and we wanted to check out Robert Mondavi Winery, but we thought twice once we saw the fee for a basic tasting and tour: $25. That seemed unspeakably expensive. (In the end, we splurged, and it was worth it.)
A winery with any of these elements — a mere $25 fee, a walk-in-friendly policy, a standing bar — would now be an outlier in Napa Valley, where the reigning model for winery visitation has transformed completely in the last decade. Today you’d be more likely to end up seated privately with your group in a secluded lounge or cabana, to munch on food pairings prepared by a lauded chef, to be attended to by a personal wine educator, and to pay $82.26 or more for it. You’d have planned it all well in advance, securing reservations that can fill up quickly, and would probably limit yourself to two wineries per day, since you’d expect to spend a couple hours at each stop.
This transformation was under way before COVID, but COVID confirmed to many wineries that seeing fewer visitors, but charging a higher fee to them, was a more profitable model than allowing scores of people to flow in with a low cost of entry. The higher tasting fee isn’t itself the revenue driver; it’s simply a gatekeeper, filtering out the customers who are unlikely to buy a case of wine — or just want to get drunk.
Who can blame the wineries? They’re all hurting due to astronomical rises in their own costs, from newly exorbitant wildfire insurance to glass bottles. A labor shortage in Wine Country means that employees can command more money, which may lead to price increases; it also means wineries are finding fewer people to employ, which has led many estates to instate by-appointment-only policies, since they can’t host as many customers. There are real, eminently justifiable reasons why wineries — and hotels and restaurants — are charging more. It’s not greed.
Whatever the intention, however, the point stands that the region is growing ever more inaccessible for a larger number of Californians. It
might not be any one person’s or group’s fault. But it’s still a shame.
Indeed, fewer people are accessing Wine Country. In one of the most-read wine stories The Chronicle published this year, Jess reported that businesses throughout the Napa and Sonoma counties were seeing a major slowdown during the summer, a disappointment for those who expected a post-COVID tourism surge. This seemed related to the rising prices, but it was unclear exactly how. Were fewer people visiting because prices had risen? Or did businesses have to charge higher prices because they were seeing fewer customers?
Either way, it’s undeniable that Wine Country is leaning into an ever more luxurious identity, a move that’s bolstered by data showing that Americans overall are buying higher-priced wine than they used to. Buying less, but buying better quality, seems to be the reigning trend. Wineries, like any business, are right to respond to this.
Yet some people in Wine Country seem to be in denial about this transformation. Anytime we published a story drawing attention to higher prices in the region, we received an angry barrage of responses from people who live and work in Napa and Sonoma counties, resistant to the perceived characterization of their home as a playground for the wealthy.
I never quite knew what to
The region is growing ever more inaccessible for a larger
number of Californians.
make of this type of reaction, since it seemed to me an irrefutable fact that prices were rising — not a subjective judgment.
This is where that puzzling contradiction comes in. It makes sense to me, from a business perspective, that Wine Country should embrace the idea that it’s a luxury destination. Luxury, if you can afford it, is enjoyable. I love many of the wine tastings I’ve experienced in the secluded cabanas, the soft morsels of gougeres that get delivered with the welcoming glass of Blanc de Blancs, the leisurely pace of it all, the personalized attention. Wineries are charging $80-plus fees for a reason. When it’s done well, I’m usually happy to pay it.
At the same time, I’ll never stop feeling a little pang when I think about the salad days of going wine tasting in 2011. When I think about how easy Napa felt then.
I wish all of my readers could be back there with me. Wine Country is one of America’s treasures, a destination that can reveal a unique window into geology, gastronomy, history, sheer natural beauty. I wish everyone could walk through a vineyard at harvest time and discover what a wine grape tastes like — it will ruin supermarket grapes for you forever. I wish everyone could drive up Howell Mountain Road and look out on the crazy quilt of the valley in peak golden light.
On the bright side, a carnitas taco at La Luna Market is still only $3.49.