The topic of winery use permits has been a hot one here in Napa County since early this year. From my viewpoint of growing  in Napa and working in the wine industry since 1993, we’re reaching a “critical mass” sort of point in the industry’s evolution. Napa County is essentially writing the textbook on how to successfully manage winery development and growth related to local regulation, tourism, and community support.

The local regulator for wineries in the unincorporated area of Napa county is the Napa County Planning office. They issue winery use permits and also do random annual audits of those permit holders. This post is written to further explain the details behind two Napa county use permit conditions which wineries are tasked with staying in compliance: the 75% grape source rule and permitted production gallons.

The first topic, the 75% grape source rule is defined as follows in the original WDO (Winery Definition Ordinance) text: “All wineries first established subsequent to January 23, 1990: at least 75% of the grapes used to make the winery’s still wine, or the still wine used by the winery to make sparkling wine, shall be grown within the county of Napa.”

What does this mean to a winery as far as assessing their use permit compliance? The Napa County Planning office will determine whether a winery is in compliance with meeting the 75% rule by viewing their grape weigh tags. (weighmaster certificates) This means the weigh tags for all grapes received into their physical site, since that is what the use permit is assigned to. In other words if your winery sends grapes to another winery site for processing (crushing, fermentation) those grapes don’t count towards your site’s use permit totals.

The next use permit condition related to wine making activities is the production gallons. The Napa county planning office uses two separate sets of wine making numbers to determine compliance for this. Both sets of these numbers come directly from the TTB 5120.17 (“702”) reports filed by the winery site. For a full description of these two sets of calculations used by the county please see my post from July: Calculations for Napa county use permit production gallons

Here again compliance is determined only from wine making activities that occur on your physical site, so both the resulting gallons from those grapes that are sent to another winery site to be processed into wine as well as any of your finished wines that are sent to another site to be bottled do not count towards your site’s county use permit production gallons.

If your winery holds a use permit issued by the Napa County Planning office, take a closer look at your list of conditions, then run the numbers from your site’s weigh tags and TTB “702” reports. I recommend doing so on an annual basis. 

Questions on exactly how to do this for your site?

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