Best Winery Bites the Dirt

[tommy]

Best Family Winery, at the corner of Hwy 116 & Occidental Rd

... after much controversy... is now for sale for $5.2 mil.

You'd have to do alot of tastings to recoup that investment..

[Richard Nichols]

Good. One wonders why. Have we reached saturation? Water issues? Hopefully Dairyman is next.

Best Family Winery, at the corner of Hwy 116 & Occidental Rd

... after much controversy... is now for sale for $5.2 mil.

You'd have to do alot of tastings to recoup that investment..

[Chris Murray]

Mmm, There's this nagging suspicion that keeps disturbing my naive little soul that they never intended to build a "family" winery ("family" is up there with "mom" and "apple pie") but simply ram the permit through and flip the property.

Good. One wonders why. Have we reached saturation? Water issues? Hopefully Dairyman is next.

[Shepherd]

I like Chris pointing out that the use of the word "family" is like using "mom" and "apple pie." It paints a pleasant picture, whereas what we are likely to face with such an expensive property is yet another place that uses poisons, like Roundup, which will drift onto the bordering highway, which many of us travel regularly.

There is a Wine Rush going on in Sonoma County with outside investors from China, other countries, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. With a more that $5 million dollar sales price of a small acreage with a permitted vineyard, it is likely that it will be purchased by a big corporation with no interest in Sonoma County, other than extracting our water and processing it in factories into wine.

Let's keep a close eye on this development. Now is the time to speak truth to power, before it is too late. Ultimately, if we are to preserve the rural character that many of us moved here to enjoy, that will be done "on the ground," in my opinion. When we picketed a Thomas Hobbs tasting in 2013 a few miles up the road from this "Best Vineyard," he shut the tasting down. We will lose our agrarian culture if we allow such developments to proceed.

Mmm, There's this nagging suspicion that keeps disturbing my naive little soul that they never intended to build a "family" winery ("family" is up there with "mom" and "apple pie") but simply ram the permit through and flip the property.