Placer County grapples with growth of small wineries

Call it the Placer County wine wars.

The county's upstart vintners say they're just trying to carve out their little homegrown niche in California's ever-burgeoning wine industry.

A vocal group of neighbors stands in their way, raising the specter of a Napa-style invasion that they say would ruin the very lifestyle that drew them to the foothills.

Placer County planning officials are stuck in the middle as they attempt to write rules to govern Placer's tiny but growing wine industry without crushing it.

The staff members working on the county's first winery ordinance are being pressed by both sides.

A citizens group says the proposed regulations are too lax and would clog the county's private roads with potentially inebriated wine tasters.

Owners of the 13 small wineries sprinkled around the county say such claims are nonsense. What the proposed rules would really do, they say, is put them out of business by subjecting them to costly permitting requirements, such as widening private roads, building parking lots and providing access for the disabled.

They say wineries should be allowed to operate tasting rooms without having to obtain special permits.

The county's Agricultural Commission is expected to make a recommendation on a new ordinance later this month.

"At this point, I don't know what the outcome will wind up being," said county Agricultural Commissioner Christine Turner.

The debate in Placer County underscores the potential for conflict all over the state as the booming wine industry deepens its reach into rural residential neighborhoods.

"Most places that have a residential-agricultural interface, like we do, all have the same issues," said Roger Trout, a planner for neighboring El Dorado County, which is working to update its own winery ordinance.

Unlike El Dorado County, which has a number of established wineries, Placer's wine industry is in its infancy.

All the county's wineries opened within the past decade. They are small family operations, bottling a wide variety of wines, with heavy emphasis on traditional foothill varietals such as barbera, zinfandel and sirah.

Placer County's zoning code heightens the potential for conflict. In much of the county, parcels zoned for farming can be as small as 4.6 acres. This means wineries often border neighbors who don't farm, and frequently share a private access road.

By contrast, wineries in El Dorado and Nevada counties generally occupy much larger parcels, said Melanie Heckel, assistant planning director in Placer County.

"You have the potential, particularly on private roads, for conflict between the winery use and the residential use," Heckel said.

A case in point is the Pescatore Winery in Newcastle, where retired high school history teacher Dave Wegner and his sons farm 5 acres of grapes.

Wegner's winery, opened in 2000, sits off a private road just across a small canyon from the dream home that Sacramento firefighter Mike Giles spent two years building with his own hands in the early 1990s. Giles has emerged as the most vocal opponent of the winery industry in Placer County.

Giles complains that loud weddings at Pescatore have disturbed the quiet of his family's country life and that Wegner operated a tasting room without a permit.

Standing on his deck overlooking a vista of horses, fields and blazing fall foliage, Giles played a tape recording of boisterous partying against a backdrop of a DJ playing "Brick House." He said he recorded the noise from the deck during a wedding celebration at Pescatore.

Giles said that incident prompted him to form Neighborhood Rescue Group, a citizens organization that opposes the county's proposed winery ordinance.

"The neighbors are just getting stomped on," Giles said. "If you look at the ordinance they're compiling now, it just rips the lid off what they're allowed to do."

One of Pescatore's other neighbors, lawyer Larry Graves, said periodic wine tours have brought heavy traffic to the one-lane private road he shares with the winery. "It's a problem when you have the big events; we had like 100 to 150 cars," he said.

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