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2008 Construction Conferrence

Building the North Bay: What's on the horizon?
Tuesday, May 20, 2008, 8-11:30 a.m., Hyatt Vineyard Creek, Santa Rosa

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Thursday, June 26, 2008, Sheraton Sonoma County, Petaluma

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Wine industry groups want more time to fight proposed changes to appellation protections

NAPA, Dec. 5, 2007 – Wine industry trade groups led by Napa Valley Vintners are alarmed by a proposed revision to federal rules for protecting the names of winegrowing subappellations and are asking for more time to respond with reasons of why they think the change will damage years of work to protect those place names.

Napa Valley Vintners, San Francisco-based Wine Institute and other trade groups as well as U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, are sending letters to the U.S. Commerce Department's Tax & Trade Bureau, which regulates alcoholic beverages and label information such as American Viticultural Areas. They are asking for an extension on the comment period on the proposed revisions by two months to March 22.

The groups said it is too challenging to get their boards of directors together to approve responses during the holiday season.

This past summer, a proposal for a Calistoga AVA brought approvals of new appellations to a standstill, especially where there were disputes from owners of labels using the appellation name. Concerns were also raised about whether a new AVA would fall within an existing appellation.

The Tax & Trade Bureau on Nov. 20 published its proposed solution to appellation names potentially trumping brand names.

For the Calistoga AVA, the bureau proposed that brands that contain that name must be made from 85 percent Calistoga grapes or have been for sale before April 2005. The bureau also would require clear label statements that the wine doesn't come from the Calistoga AVA.

That would go against a hard-fought battle Napa Valley Vintners won in the Legislature to limit the Napa name to wines with Napa Valley grapes. The group was battling against Bronco Wine Co.'s Napa Ridge brand that was bottled south of Napa but at the time had less than the required local grape content. That led to a similar law last year to protect the Sonoma name.

"The safeguards Napa has erected over time need state regulations and federal regulations intact to work," said Wine Institute general counsel Wendell Lee in a phone interview. "When there is a change in one or the other, those safeguards can unravel rapidly."

Napa Valley Vintners in a statement said the proposal "will undermine decades of work on the part of the wine industry to establish a workable AVA system in the U.S. similar to those used throughout the rest of the world."

Regarding the AVA approval process in general, the 1986 “grandfather” threshold would be amended with a "rolling grandfather" of five to eight years before the AVA proposal is filed.

Also, applications for subappellations would undergo greater scrutiny to determine how the smaller area differs from the larger region, leading to possible exclusion of the use of the larger appellation on labels. That could challenge marketing efforts for new winegrowing regions that may not be as well-known.

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