Bill Hocker | May 19, 2021

The Planning Commission approved the Benjamin Ranch Winery on 5/19/21 to complete the approval of the 6 wineries that came up last fall. The developer had dropped the visitation numbers from 154,000/yr to 87,000/yr even before the project was continued in Sept. The vote here was 3-2 with Comms. Cottrell and Joelle opposed. Given the opposition to the project at the first hearing including from activist organizatons, significant wine industry names with lawyers, CEQA letters and peer traffic reports, it was a bit odd that the project had so little opposition in this hearing. Only two individual neighbors spoke. Where did that opposition go? What gives?

Agenda and documents
Video of hearing

One interesting public comment made in support of the project was from a friend of Mr. Frank, who traveled the world a lot, and wanted to support Napa Valley wherever he could. He said "I will say to you that one of our biggest challenges going forward is to repolish the brand that we all call Napa Valley. We need to take that challenge very very seriously." I haven't heard compliants about the quality of Napa wines. Perhaps the bottle price. Or perhaps the cost of staying and eating here. Or the traffic to be endured getting here. There is much that should be done to polish the brand, but I'm not sure how the 87,000 more visitors a year, and the traffic they will add, will do it. In fact, the last thing needed now is another mega-tourist attraction hoping to turn Napa into a wine-themed Branson or Las Vegas. Perhaps the tarnish the speaker felt while trying to boost the Valley in his world travels, was the transition the world knows as "napafication": the process of draining a wine region of its authenticity by turning it into a tourist attraction. One more ride in the amusement park won't help.

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