Bill Hocker | Nov 15, 2017

Michael Bernick LTE 11/14/17: Beyond the fires: what the Napa Valley economy can teach us

I have tried not to get worked up about this puff piece in support of the head of the Napa tourism industry's lobbying organization, Visit Napa Valley. It is a yeoman effort at boosting tourism after the fire by a credible author, who, as someone uninterested in drinking wine, at a time when the landscape is a mess, encourages tourism just to appreciate the hand-craft nuts-and-bolts involved in winemaking. It is an extension of the dubious "educational" mission of winery visitation, enshrined in the WDO, that allows wineries to become very profitable restaurants and party venues in all respects but their code definition, and legitimizes a proliferation of wineries and inducement of visitation despite little actual increase in wine production.

As Clay Gregory is probably happy to tell you, the percentage of revenues from tourism vs wine is increasing each year. It will not be long before tourism (an inherently more profitable enterprise than wine making) will be the dominant economic engine with wine production less and less important as an actual industry. Boutique, hand-crafted wines will still be necessary to give a reason for the tourism trade, but the production of Napa wine will come under increasing stress as land is developed to return higher profits than wine making alone can sustain.

The problem is not that Napa will become a tourism economy rather than a wine making economy. It is what a tourism economy does to a place. If successful, it will become, as Las Vegas has become, an urban tourist trap, filled with high rise hotels and glitzy event centers instead of casinos. And more and more entrepreneurs will continue to arrive to try to cash into the success. Napa may not look like Las Vegas in my lifetime. But the trajectory is already upon us, in the many hotel projects in the works and the monthly stream of new winery venues and winery visitation expansion being approved.

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