As summer heats up and more tourists come to Sonoma for wine-tasting, among its other “destination city” attractions, residents are growing increasingly restless over the absence of limits on tasting rooms in the downtown business district.
A recent count showed 30 tasting rooms just around the Sonoma Plaza in the commercial zoning district — as well as several restaurants and taverns that also sell alcohol — and at least one more in the works for opening this summer.
This demonstrates an increase of almost 50 percent in just the last three years, according to figures from a 2014 staff report to the Sonoma City Council. That report counted 20 tasting rooms, out of 136 ground-floor businesses within the overlay zone, and three more as a combination of wine tasting and other retail.
It’s a trend that has many locals concerned, if not discouraged. Wrote one commenter on a recent article on the subject, “They (tasting rooms) are a terrible intrusion on what was once a wonderful shopping area around the Plaza. There was a real meat market, a supermarket, a hardware store, a drug store/ice cream parlor ….”
Visitors, however, don’t find it a problem at all. “Some people complain about the cost of tasting, but nobody complains about too many tasting rooms,” said Anne Berke, at Fulcrum Wines in the Sonoma Court Shops complex of businesses.
The apparent plethora of tasting rooms has drawn comparisons with another Sonoma wine country destination, Healdsburg. Though Healdsburg has a similar number of tasting rooms in its downtown business district, they are spread out over a wider area, thanks to a long-standing dispersal policy that permits only one tasting room per “block face.”
“Meaning you can have a tasting room on one side of the street and another on the other side, so it’s really two per block,” said Healdsburg’s City Manager David Mickaelian. “What they’re trying to avoid is having two tasting rooms next to each other.”
That policy has been an unofficial guide for most of the decade, but this summer Healdsburg’s City Council is expected to codify it in the Development Code. (As Capt. Barbossa said in the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, “The Pirate’s Code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules ….”)
This points to one key difference between how Healdsburg handles tasting-room permitting and how Sonoma does it. Sonoma has no use permit required to open a tasting room, just a Class 2 ABC license that makes it possible to get a business license to operate in the downtown business district. This means opening a tasting room is essentially a nonreviewed process: there’s nothing in the Sonoma Development Code that says otherwise.
In the mixed-use zone, which roughly extends down Broadway south of Maple and in some other pockets of the city as well, a use permit is mandatory, which requires Planning Commission review with City Council oversight. A more rigorous process, yes — but once issued, a use permit “runs with the land,” meaning changing the winery won’t void the permit to operate a tasting room at that location. That’s not true with a business license: not only must it be renewed annually, but if the business changes a new license is needed, and a new winery can’t ride on an earlier tasting room’s permit without their own Class 2 ABC license.
This story originally appeared at sonomanews.com/home/7115532-181/no-simple-solutions-for-sonomas.
