Bureaucrats descend like locusts onto California’s famed Napa Valley winemakers -report

With the proliferation of bureaucrats in leftist-run California, they’re descending like locusts onto the farms of not just California’s lower Central Valley, but now the Napa Valley and its wine makers, according to the U.K. Daily Mail. The farmers are swatting back.

The Daily Mail reports:

Napa Valley’s prestigious wineries have launched a revolt against ‘abusive’ county officials, accusing bureaucrats of killing the region’s famous vineyards with absurd and excessive red tape.

Wealthy vintners say they are being ‘crushed’ by ‘gross regulatory overreach’, which has included penalizing wineries for planting trees, making jam and conducting wine tastings on their own land.

One vineyard was even fined $1million for making too much wine.

Making wine is already a heavily regulated industry. California’s has always been more regulated than most. But the bureaucrats are getting out of control now, apparently watching every little move a grape farm or winery makes and then swooping in to descend, crawling all over them like bugs, draining the lifeblood of these pride-of-California operations. The Mail  has a string of horror stories.

It’s sad, sorry, stuff, this overregulation of little farms for trying to sell jams and jellies on the side, something all farms do worldwide to earn extra cash, or to hold wine-tastings, which is what these farms are expected to do, or telling a Napa Valley farmer from a farm that got burned out in the monstrous 2020 Glass Fire (brought on by environmental regulations) that he can’t plant the trees he lost to create the windblocks he needs to protect his crops. That was a doozy. One farmer, who tried to take advantage of his farm’s beautiful scenic location by offering yoga classes, was snidely told by the karen-like county representative that he didn’t want Napa to become ‘Disneyland’:

The county sued Hoopes in 2022, alleging she had created a ‘public nuisance’ by offering yoga classes, wine tastings, selling greeting cards and hand sanitiser, and not getting a permit for her 120 square feet chicken coop.

A lawyer representing the county said the rules are in place to keep Napa Valley from becoming ‘Disneyland’, a statement Hoopes believes is preposterous.

Last I heard, Disneyland doesn’t offer yoga classes. The farmers only offer these things to boost their cash income, because of all their ongoing taxes and regulatory burdens from their main operations. Maybe that’s the real problem.

The report didn’t get into it, but most of us have noticed that Napa Valley wines, despite their proximity to us in California, carry a heftier price tag than the wines of other countries based on this overregulation, so it’s obvious that even trans-ocean tanker costs are nothing compared to the regulatory burden Napa Valley’s farmers endure out in California.

Got a nice thing? The bureaucrats will come in and destroy it. It’s like something out of Ayn Rand at this point. It’s actually like Argentina before the election of President Javier Milei this past year. The bureaucrats there, as I recall Diana Mondino (now Milei’s foreign minister) once told me, would overregulate any industry they considered progressive and modern, such as automobiles. But the industries they had contempt for, such as anything involving the grimy gauchos out working on the pampas, they tended to ignore. So, those less-regulated industries tended to grow (in Argentina, it was the wineries) while the automobile industry in that country shriveled. We have heard about imported wines from Argentina for years, but nobody hears much about Argentine cars, and there’s a reason for that.

In California, the bureaucrats hear lots about the famed and marvelous California wineries, and do all they can to chase them out and shut them down. It’s as if they don’t want any of us to have nice things. An added factor is that the farmers tend to be conservative voters, particularly the old winemaking families, so the impetus from them is even stronger. With each regulatory burden they impose, the price of wine goes up and the goods become scarcer. One farmer interviewed by the Daily Mail said she was thinking of packing up and moving to Fredericksburg, Texas, where wine is also grown, and other farmers had already done it.

What a sorry state of affairs this is. They have a golden goose in their famed wine production, and all they do is think up ways to kill it. Obviously, legislation is behind these bureaucratic crawlers infesting the place, but that’s where the change is least-likely, given the ignorant fools creatures roosted in Sacramento. So, lawsuits it is, and one can only hope that there are lots of people on those juries who see exactly what these parasites are doing.

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