Napa Valley has enjoyed an iconic image as an unparalleled success story in wine, food and tourism. In our latest story, “Napa’s Water War with Big Wine,” reporter Stett Holbrook peels back the bucolic veneer and finds a troubling story of wine resorts run amok, with plans for luxury, water-guzzling hotels, vineyards expanding up fragile hillsides, and threatened water resources at a time of extended drought. “We’re told not to flush our toilets,” one critic of development told Holbrook. “I want to know where the water will come from.”
The story, published with Bohemian, which serves Sonoma and Napa counties, offers a rare look at what the early wine pioneers of Napa envisioned. As the first agricultural preserve in the nation, Napa “prevented the type of development that has gobbled so much farmland around the Bay Area. But today, Napa’s challenge is to protect the land from the excesses of what agriculture has become — viticulture, wineries and activities that look more like tourism than agriculture,” Holbrook writes.
This has led to a battle on two fronts, since the valley’s agricultural lands have been tapped out. Wineries are moving up hills onto undeveloped land that remains, removing forest and spurring pollution downstream from agricultural runoff. That, in turn, threatens water supplies.
A recent citizen-led move to constrain Napa development got more than enough signatures to make it onto the ballot, but the measure was thrown out at the last minute on a technicality. Needless to say, the multibillion-dollar wine industry opposed it. But activists aren’t sitting still. “We have to hit the pause button,” environmentalist Chris Malan told Holbrook. “We’ve got to figure out how to get this right, because it’s just not OK to kill all the fish and have people drink polluted water.”
Read the full story here at FERN’s site and at Bohemian.
Also, FERN wins another award: Reporter Lisa Morehouse’s 2015 piece, “Grapes of Wrath,” which aired on KQED and told the forgotten story of the Filipino-Americans who led the 1965 Delano Grape Strike, won an Edward R. Murrow Award for its use of sound.
And a reminder: To celebrate our fifth birthday, we’re publishing an anthology of some of our favorite stories, The Dirt: Dispatches from the front lines of food and agriculture: 2011-2016. For a donation of $100 or more you’ll reserve your copy, which includes a foreword by Michael Pollan.
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Sam Fromartz
Editor-in-Chief
Food & Environment Reporting Network
@FERNnews
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Photo by Paulo Vescia