Soda Canyon Road | Hillwaker use permit and gallons/visitor

Hillwaker use permit and gallons/visitor

on the web at: https://sodacanyonroad.org/forum.php?p=2332

Bill Hocker | Aug 3, 2024

Update 8/26/24

NVR 8/26/24: Small Mount Veeder winery gains Napa County approval

8/3/24

Another winery use permit is coming up before the Planning Commission on 8/7/24. The Hillwalker Vineyards WInery is a proposed (quite modest) 7000 gal winery located several winding miles up Mt. Veeder Road.
The hearing notice is here.
Staff agenda letter and documents are here.

I was struck by the proposed request for 113 visitors/wk and a 45-person event once a month, 6146 people/yr for a winery producing only 7000 gal/yr. As I have tried to point on this site, locating tourism attractions on remote rural roads in high fire zones is not optimal. In the case of Mt. Veeder Road there are well known landslide problems as well. But that was not what piqued my interest here. It was the ratio of a little over 1 gallon of wine produced per visitor.

That ratio is normally looked at for a select few comparatively-sized wineries as the projects are reviewed by the Planning Commission. But I though it might be interesting to look at the ratio of wine produced per visitor for all of the post-WDO wineries in the county database. (Pre-WDO wineries have a much more convoluted ratio of gallons to visitors.) The post-WDO gallons/visitor ratio list is here.

A ratio of 1 gallon produced for each visitor entertained is not ususal: wineries with a ratio of less than 2gal/visitor constitute less than 10% of the psot-WDO wineries. The median is about 6 gal/visitor.

Such wineries, if they realize their visitation potential, can be looked at two ways: they are either very efficient, per gallon of wine produced, at generating the tourism income that is increasingly the economic engine of the county; or they are very detrimental, per gallon of wine produced, in generating the impacts of increased traffic, resource and infrastructure stress, employee housing demand, and agriculture-killing urbanizaiton that a tourism economy produces. By comparison wineries with a high ratio of gal/vis, the large wineries with relatively little visitation, boost the continued viability of an agricultural economy in an urban region. It's an interesting ratio.