Bill Hocker | Sep 11, 2015 on: Anthem Winery

I have just begun this separate Anthem Winery page. Their request for the expansion of their small winery to become 25,000sf event center will be a long process.

At one of the APAC meetings, Julie Arbuckle, owner of Anthem Winery, read a statement of her concerns about the amounts of visitation that Planning Director Morrison was proposing for future wineries in an effort to try to stem the torrent of tourism currently being requested by developers of winery projects. In it she exemplified everything that is currently wrong with the tourism processing approach to winemaking. It is an approach that lifts capitalism straight out of the 19th century, that concerns itself only with rate of return on investment in a conspicuous display of wealth, and has little regard for the impact on the community in which her capitalist adventure takes place or of the long term impacts of a county increasingly urbanized to accommodate an ever expanding number of tourists. Her statement is here. My response to her letter is here.