Bill Hocker | Jul 8, 2015

While I promised myself not to bother the APAC with further rants about tourism, the letter from Julie Arbuckle included in the meeting #7 documents needs a response. It illustrates as clearly as possible why there has been so much community concern about the development of event center wineries and why the Supervisors felt it was necessary to create the APAC.

The proliferation of wineries, built as dream projects by wealthy individuals with no economic justification for wine production but containing a heavy dose of tourists to justify their costs (and no doubt to admire the life-style of their owners), has occurred without consideration for the damage that tourism development does to the residential nature of affected neighborhoods or to the infrastructure, land and water resources of the county, or, in fact, to the viability of an economy based on agriculture.

There is no end of individuals in this world with the income to realize a dream winery of their own in one of the best known wine capitals on earth. Strong measures are necessary if all 4500 parcels currently allowed to have wineries are not to become event centers surrounded by tour buses and a dwindling garnish of vineyards, all in the name of selling wine that is currently being processed elsewhere in the county and currently sold through more efficient channels.

In specific response to the letter:

First: The small number of visitors in Proposal X insures that accessory uses such as tours, tastings, marketing and sales, are clearly incidental and subordinate to the main purpose of a winery as a processing facility as required by county ordinances and the general plan. If a winery is unprofitable as a grape processing facility, then perhaps the winery should not be built. In Napa county there are still profits to be made from growing grapes, which, of course, is the intention of the ag zoning. Owners should be encouraged to envision that as the highest and best use of their land rather than pursuing unnecessary and expensive building developments. The unused building costs might then be profitably invested in risk-free Treasury bonds to supplement grape profits.

As Ms. Arbuckle implies, tourism revenues are necessary to pay off the cost of these expensive and risky investments. But it is not the county's obligation to insure that all development projects become profitable. It is within the county's discretion to decide that unnecessary building projects not be built on ag lands, which I would urge them to do more often than they have.

Second: The agricultural preserve and the zoning regulations approved by the voters of Napa county were created exactly because growing things cannot compete profitably with other commercial or residential land uses. It is those commitments to a less profitable land use, made previously by far-sighted politicians and residents, that have allowed the wine industry to survive in a rapidly urbanizing world. To allow agricultural profits be supplemented by building construction and commercial uses in the vineyards makes a mockery of the purpose of the zoning.

Third: Direct-to-consumer sales at dream wineries represent a minuscule portion of the Napa brand wine being produced and sold. All DTC sales constitute about 14% of Napa brand wine sales. The bulk of that number is probably mail-order wine club sales which can be generated by many marketing ploys. Much of the rest is probably wine sold at major wineries in the valley. Are the negative tourism nightmares that one dream winery brings to its community, and the development impacts ever more visitors contribute to the county, worth a nonexistent increase to the economic viability of the Napa wine industry? Aren't direct winery sales and the explosion of dream wineries really just a convenient collaboration between a tourism industry's need for venues and entrepreneurs more interested in a glamorous "business" that doesn't require the legwork and effort that previous generations of vintners had to do to build their brands and the reputation of the Napa Valley?

In the near term all available Napa grapes will probably be processed into Napa wine and sold profitably on the world market whether more wineries are built or not. However, dream vintners, willing to pay any price, pump up the price of Napa grapes. Growers may profit in the short term, but an inflated grape price puts the real wine industry, the one that actually makes the quantity of Napa brand wines needed to compete in the world market, at an economic disadvantage. While dream wineries my bolster the local tourism economy, they may actually be making the Napa wine industry, and the survival of its vines, less viable in the future.

Finally the county should not base its decisions on the precedent of bad decisions previously made. The APAC has been convened exactly because permitted visitation numbers, like a stock market bubble, have been approved at unsustainable levels, encouraging further urban development that will eventually swamp the needs of agriculture for land and water. That development will kill the rural, small-town life that county residents have voted to preserve thereby allowing agriculture to survive.

The growth of an agricultural economy is limited by the land and water resources available. The county is reaching those limits and it is time to envision a stable economy and to question the self-serving notion that profits must forever increase or an economy dies. An ethic of ever increasing economic growth will only encourage, as evidenced in the dream wineries, the urban development of the vineyards - and at best the survival of agriculture as an incidental and subordinate accessory to tourist venues. Severe caps on visitation at wineries, perhaps even greater than those envisioned in Proposal X, are necessary to halt that trend.

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