Bill Hocker | Jun 12, 2014

[Response to Rob McMillin's article "Why Do Locals Hate Wineries So Much?"]

Rob-

My sincere thanks for what is a fairly balanced look at the issues. As NIMBY-in-chief in the article I had better respond. I would suggest one obvious solution to the traffic in your backyard: reduce the tourist numbers. It is the equating of tourism and agriculture in the WDO, instigated and reinforced by development interests, that has led to a tourism industry beginning to engulf the wine industry. Your traffic jams are a sure sign of the decay of an agricultural economy. Everyone is quite right to assume that I am self-interested in wanting to arrest that decay in my backyard. My backyard is agriculture and I am not interested in living next to a tourist attraction. Also the property rights mantra was invoked here. Let's be clear - if property rights advocates had been in charge in 1968 we would not be discussing a wine industry now.

The original intent of the Williamson Act and of the Ag Preserve was to protect small-scale agriculture from the more profitable development of the land for housing, shopping centers and tourist attractions. Our government seems to have lost sight of that initial premise. Development interests, always seeking to maximize profits from a piece of land, have been pressing on the dikes of the Ag Preserve since its inception. A major fissure occurred with the augmented tourism provisions of the 2010 revision to the WDO, and profiteering in the name of saving agriculture has become the norm since. But ask any of the developers of these new projects if they will forgo the tourism and just build a winery - they will refuse. The reality is that new wineries are unnecessary; 100% of Napa grapes will find a happy bottle in an exiting Napa winery forever. All of the 2013 crop of Napa grapes could have been processed in just one existing Napa winery, one building, and still left many of its fermentation tanks empty. But, given our legal lip-service to agriculture, wineries are a necessary accessory if a tourist attraction is to be built. Hence they are proposed.

The wine industry has survived and can survive with minimal tourism, as the Ag Preserve envisioned, if the attitude of maximizing profits is replaced with an attitude of sustainable profits. There are vintners, committed to the quality of their product and the dedication to their craft, that have eschewed tourism and still operate profitably. That is the wine industry you feel is misguided in their attitude toward tourist attractions. From my standpoint, that is the wine industry that our government, through revisions to the WDO should be supporting to move the county back to the agricultural base at the heart of the commitment made 45 years ago.

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