Bill Hocker | Oct 27, 2015Update 3/26/16: The
Beau Vigne Winery Major Mod. is coming up before the Planning Commission on Apr 20th. It is a modest expansion but just one more venue contributing to the heavy commercialization of the Soda Canyon Junction. Another 6,000 g/y, another 4500 visitor slots/y. All of these projects will add up to huge traffic impacts along this stretch of the Trail.
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Another winery event center has just been proposed on Soda Canyon Road, the
Grassi Family Winery. I will continue to follow it over the next few years
here. It caused me to look again at my
map of development projects going on in the county. Zooming around at a larger scale, I realized that there is a concentration of future projects planned for the area at the junction of Soda Canyon Road and the Silverado Trail. It is sometimes hard to see these relationships when looking at individual projects divorced from maps and over a period of time. This new project joins quite a few projects that have been approved or are under review. Is this instance just a statistical abberation? Certainly Stagecoach and Antica have a lot of grapes to haul out of the canyon and this may reflect that connection. Or not. There are lots of development projects in the works in Napa County and some are bound to cluster even in a random distribution.
It amounts to 5 new wineries and 3 major mods within a 1 km radius. Here is the list:
Corona: new 100,000 g/y winery 20,000 vis/y
Krupp Bros: new 50,000 g/y 25,000 vis/y
Grassi: new 25,000 g/y 3899 vis/y
Reynolds: mod +20,000 g/y +14,000 vis/y
Sam Jasper: new 20,000 g/y 8800 vis u/k
Kitchak: new + mod 15,000 g/y 6000/vis/y
Beau Vigne: mod +6000 g/y 4500 vis/y
About 240,000 new g/y in capacty
About 80,000 new visitation slots/year
Should we be concerned about the already dangerous left turns being made from Soda Canyon on to the Trail? Or the time spent in the queue waiting for our turn to tempt fate. Has the traffic generated by all of these projects been analyzed as part of the MPV traffic analysis which seems to focus on the traffic counts of existing traffic?