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Gerhard Reisacher wants to build a winery at his vineyard on Ida Clayton Road above Knights Valley. (KENT PORTER/PD)
By BRETT WILKISON
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Knights Valley is an isolated slice of Sonoma County known for sun-baked vineyards, million-dollar estates and ranches that have been in the same family for generations.
It only has one winery, and now plans for two more have turned the picturesque valley off Highway 128 east of Healdsburg into a new front in the growing battle over the wine industry’s reach into the farthest corners of the county.
Plans for the two small wineries have brought a standoff between winemakers and some longtime residents and an environmental group that includes other local landowners who are determined to stop the proposals through legal challenges.
For decades, grape growers and vintners have drawn criticism for clearing woodlands, draining water sources and intruding into rural lands. That criticism has grown as many of the best spots for wineries and vineyards have been taken, leaving more remote locations where any new building can have effects that appear more stark.
In Knights Valley, the debate has splintered a neighborhood association and split residents into rival camps that have exchanged sharp jabs over the proposed wineries.
Two more wineries in addition to the existing Peter Michael Winery would despoil the rural area, opponents say.
“It’s not that we’re anti-commerce for the valley,” said area resident Craig Horan. “It’s just that we’re (against) massive commercialization of the area.”
But Gerhard Reisacher, 44, who wants to move his Delectus Winery from Napa to his Knights Valley property, said his opponents have only offered resistance.
“They want it to be so expensive that you’ll walk away from the property, or if you do go through with it and get the permit, that you won’t have any money left to build,” he said. “Their whole agenda is to wreck your dream.”
Backers of his winery and the second, Pelton House Winery proposed by wine magnate Jess Jackson, say Knights Valley once hosted six wineries in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Gloria Ball, a land rights activist and Knights Valley resident whose husband’s family ran one of the early wineries in the area, said foes disregard that history.
“They’ve made a lot of enemies and caused a lot of difficulty for people financially,” she said.
The latest dispute involves Reisacher’s boutique Napa winery that he wants to move to 112 acres he and his wife, Linda, bought off Ida Clayton Road in 2005 and converted partly to vineyards. Their 12,000-case winery would offer tasting on weekdays by appointment only and would be off-limits to special events.
But opponents, including the 2-year-old Maacama Watershed Alliance, which has about two dozen core members, and some landowners in the area are demanding an exhaustive environmental review.
They’re concerned about the winery’s size, increased traffic on Ida Clayton Road — a narrow, winding route originally carved out by miners — and effects on wildlife and water quality.
They’ve appealed the project’s unanimous approval in April by the county’s Board of Zoning Adjustments to the Board of Supervisors, which is to take up the issue Tuesday.
People on both sides say it carries broad implications for how the county approves wineries.
One side insists that process has been too lax.
“The county is trying to approve these projects without doing proper review,” said Craig Enyart, a real estate adviser and leader of the watershed group who’s lived in the valley since 1999.
The group claimed a legal victory in June when a judge ordered the county to require a full environmental impact report for Jackson’s proposed Pelton House Winery, off Highway 128 near Ida Clayton Road. The county approved the 5,000-case winery without an EIR last year.
The group is now pressing for a full environmental study of the Delectus project and has vowed to sue if the winery is approved without one.
“The only way the county is going to clean up their act is if we take them to court,” Enyart said.
Wine industry representatives said, however, that added red tape and legal challenges will stifle business, especially for smaller wineries, such as Delectus.
Environmental impact reports, which take months if not years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, have only been required for two wineries in the county, a 4.9 million-case Gallo facility in Dry Creek Valley, and the 360,000-case La Crema Winery owned by Kendall-Jackson.
Smaller projects must still undergo various studies and changes to get approval, but even that step is no guarantee against legal action.
In the Sebastopol area, the Best family spent years pushing their 26,000-case, 5,000-square-foot winery through the planning pipeline. In early June, after several revisions, the Board of Supervisors approved the project.
“It’s been a long road,” Casey Costello, a family representative, said after the decisive vote.
Weeks later, a group of Sebastopol residents called Concerned Citizens for Responsible Land Use sued the county and the family over the winery.
“At some point, if the costs are too great, people aren’t going to bother to try” opening up a winery, said Nick Frey, president of the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission.
In Knights Valley, that’s the aim of winery opponents, Reisacher said.
He started the winery in 1995 and now operates out of a warehouse in downtown Napa. The winery’s reds, including cabernet, merlot and petite syrah, sell for $40 to $135 a bottle.
Reisacher said he’s invested five years and thousands of dollars on studies and revisions of his proposed winery. Nothing seems to satisfy its critics, he said.
“You can have everything supporting your project and still it allows people who are in opposition to go after you again and again and again. It’s really making a mockery out of the process.”
Supporters and critics are at odds over almost every aspect of the project.
The concerns about traffic, soils, water and wildlife have been studied extensively and will be addressed, where necessary, with mitigation, Reisacher and county officials say.
“We’re satisfied that our analysis and the professional studies that have been done are adequate to support the project,” said Sigrid Swedenborg, the county planner overseeing the proposal.
But the watershed group says those efforts fall short and the county must subject wineries, especially any Knights Valley project, to more rigorous review or face more lawsuits.
“There may be an appropriate development in Knights Valley, but we just haven’t seen it yet,” said Enyart, the group leader. “What they’re doing here (with the Delectus Winery) is not going to work in size and scope. It’s going to require an EIR. And I don’t think they want to hear that.”
Reisacher, meanwhile, appears anxious, exasperated and resigned about the legal gantlet his project still may be required to run if given the green light by supervisors.
“It’s not like we’re coming in to this with some big checkbook,” he said. “Yes, we’re building something that’s currently not there. But you go through all this, you do all the studies. And after five years it’s still the same approach (from opponents). You understand how frustrating that is? It’s like a broken record.”
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“They want it to be so expensive that you’ll walk away from the property, or if you do go through with it and get the permit, that you won’t have any money left to build,” he said. “Their whole agenda is to wreck your dream.”….so said the property owner. Hey, what about my dream to live in a rural setting, not in a neighborhood with a commercial operation? The Planning Commission has routinely accepted the $$ from these project hopeful people and elevated their ‘dream’ above the residents’ ‘dream’.
“The only way the county is going to clean up their act is if we take them to court,” Enyart said.
Ahhhh, here is the crux of the problem! Why does the Planning Department continuously go to Court to defend their decisions and lose at that level? Because they are not doing the neutral job they are supposed to be doing. If I was a project hopeful rather than a landowner, I would check with an outside consultant on whether my plans were indeed viable and likely to prevail before I spent a lot of money on architects, dirt work people, etc, and listened to the sweet talk of the Planning Department, telling me what I want to hear. And for God’s sake, get a R-E-A-L traffic report!
This situation is simple. One person (Jess Jackson does not qualify as a person, rather as an elephant) wants to do something that his neighbors object to.
Pretty classic.
Mr. Reisacher has made the classic mistake of ignoring the importance of his neighbors opinions in his quest for his dream that provides no benefit to his neighbors, only adversity and anger.
He should admit his financial error and move on before he loses more money and respect.
Just because there were vintners in the area a century ago has no bearing, just as wineries of a hundred years ago are nothing like the behemoths of today.
Mr. Reisacher and the Best family must realize the laws they protest were put in place to control people like them.
Continued whining won’t change the fact that their dreams are another persons’ nightmare.