Editorial: Red tape leaves red wine growers queasy

Napa Valley wineries are facing a problem they can’t drink away — overzealous regulators.

For decades, tourists have come to Napa Valley to tour and drink at its world-famous wineries. This has been a lucrative business. There are a large number of people who enjoy wine, but few places on Earth have the right combination of sun and rain to produce high-quality grapes. This would seem like an unstoppable combination.

Enter overbearing local government officials. As reason.com reports, Napa County instituted a “Winery Definition Ordinance” in 1990. It required that wineries secure a use permit — a government permission slip — to have tastings. The law imposed a host of expensive requirements on wineries that sought to hold tastings, including an on-site facility that produced wine. The cost of jumping through these hoops could run into the millions.

Large wineries were able to shoulder the expense, but it could have crushed small wineries. As such, the law gave them an exemption from these onerous demands. Small wineries hosted wine tastings at their vineyards for years. But county officials have revisited the issue and now claim it’s illegal.

“One winery was sued by the county for engaging in such allegedly nefarious activities as hosting tastings, hanging up decorative lights and conducting yoga classes on-site (the county ran a sting on the winery using ‘secret shoppers’),” C. Jarrett Dieterle wrote for Reason.

Oh, such bureaucratic bravery in the face of this unmitigated horror. Just imagine: People drinking wine — in California’s Napa Valley, of all places.

Tastings aren’t the only practice that have gotten wineries in trouble with the administrative state. Jayson Woodbridge owns the Hundred Acre Wine Group. After a 2020 fire burned 80 acres on his property, he attempted to plant a new type of vineyard on his property. The county sent him a “Stop Work Order.” He understandably contends that the county shouldn’t be telling him what to do with his own private land.

Wineries are fighting back. In one case, three wineries have sued Napa County for rules that are “so vague as to allow Napa County officials to use their unfettered discretion to restrict winery operations as they see fit.” They also contend their wine tastings are protected by the First Amendment.

It shouldn’t take a court order to get these regulators to back off. But all too often, those in government — especially in California — seek to handcuff businesses, instead of helping them.

Unfortunately, the world’s best wine is no match for the Nanny State’s pettiest bureaucrats.