Napa County’s policy of
choosing 20 wineries at random each year to see if they are complying with
county rules doesn’t go far enough for the grand jury.
Not when Napa County has about
350 wineries actively producing wine, raising the possibility that a winery
could go a couple of decades without an audit. Not when winery compliance with
county rules has become a hot-button issue in the community.
“The audits are limited in
scope and all conditions specified by the use permits are not reviewed,” a new
Napa County grand jury report stated. “This coupled with the relatively small
number of wineries audited may not give a full picture of compliance.”
Napa County should audit each
winery every five years or at intervals the county Planning Commission and
Board of Supervisors deem appropriate, the grand jury recommended. In addition,
the county should reveal the identities of wineries that fail to receive a
clean audit.
Planning, Building and
Environmental Services Director David Morrison said Tuesday that the county has
yet to formulate its responses to these and other recommendations in the
report.
The grand jury called its
report “Are Napa County Wineries Following the Rules?”
Napa County’s annual winery
audit looks at such issues as whether the selected wineries are complying with
permitted wine production and visitation limits. It looks at whether wineries
required to source 75 percent of their grapes from Napa County are doing so.
For the audits done for 2011
through 2013, 30 percent to 40 percent of the wineries each year failed to meet
at least one use permit requirement, the grand jury report said.
The Board of Supervisors
discussed code enforcement on March 3. It touched on the grand jury idea of
identifying the winery audit scofflaws.
“How about we have a wall of
shame?” Supervisor Mark Luce said at that meeting. “I think that’s what people
really care about — their reputations.”
He suggested later that a wall
of shame for winery audit violations could be posted on the Internet. But it
was unclear at that meeting whether Luce’s idea will gain traction with his
colleagues.
Napa Valley Vintners represents
about 500 local vintners. Spokesman Rex Stults on Tuesday said the group holds
compliance workshops for its members. About 1,000 people have attended over
seven years.
Last summer’s wine audits saw a
spike in infractions, some minor, Stults said. Eight of the 20 wineries had an
infraction.
“The timing could not have been
worse and folks have been latching onto that and are proclaiming the sky is
falling,” Stults said. “Hopefully, there is not an overreaction in general.”
Stults didn’t address the grand
jury’s recommendations because he had just seen them and Napa Valley Vintners
has yet to take a position on them.
“Our constant position is all
businesses – not just wineries – should be following all relevant laws and
regulations,” he said.
Residents are discussing a
growing wine industry and its impact on traffic, the environment and other
quality-of-life issues, the grand jury report stated. The county should
determine whether winery laws provide the framework needed to maintain a wine
industry consistent with agricultural protection laws, it recommended.
Napa County is already
addressing this issue to some extent. The Board of Supervisors held a March 10
growth summit and subsequently appointed an Agricultural Protection Advisory
Committee to look at winery and farming issues.
The grand jury report noted the
difficulties of determining how many wineries are located in the county. One
complication is “virtual wineries” that use brick-and-mortar wineries to do
their crushing and processing.
Napa County’s winery data base
lists 467 wineries. A county report from March said there are 348 wineries
actively producing wine and a Federal Alcohol, Trade and Tax Bureau report for
2014 said there are 603 wineries.
May 28, 2015
Napa
Valley Register
By
Barry Eberling
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