AN OPEN (MAGICAL THINKING) LETTER TO ALL NAPKINS: LOWER YOUR PRICES

Mr. Postman, De Liver De Letter the Sooner the Better

An open letter To Wineries, Restaurants and Hotels of Napa Valley: For everyone’s sake, including you all: Lower your prices.

· To Wineries: Cap your bottles at $100; and your tasting room fees to $50, and make your wines use only 35% new oak, alcs. no more than 14.5% and pick your grapes at 24 Brix;

· To Restaurants: No entrée should be more than 30 bucks. No wines by the glass should be more than $15;

· To Hotels: No room should be more than 400 smack-a-roos; and a one-dy stay should be de rigueur.

I know this is magical thinking, but if you don’t reduce your prices and align your tech numbers, the only people you’ll get to come up to the Valley are the Boomers – and there aren’t many who will be around in five years. Sure, you’ll be swamped in the coming decade by AI bros and sistroes with shekels to burn, but what will the fun be in that (save, of course, putting their dough in your ovens)? But they won’t talk to you. They won’t ask questions and they’ll likely not be appreciative of your efforts.

Like pictures of vineyards, a hand is a hand is a hand

Oh, your hands will appear all over the internet as you pour your wines and they zoom in to take snaps; but like pictures of vineyards, a hand is a hand is a hand. The Anonymous Hands will be the next hot boy band.

I know you Napkins won’t appreciate this screed. Not one bit. Afterall, I pissed some of you off with rants such as this back in the early 2000s, just as Blake Gray has taken swipes at Napa Valley for years; and he’s persona non-grata in many circles in the Land of Wine Nirvana. But I love you all and poked you as I did because your Valley is where I learned so much about wine; and where I met a lot of incredible human beings.

TED HALL’S VOICE-OF-REASON CRY TO HIS NEIGHBORS

Lately, you good burghers of the Valley – especially some of you UpValley swells – have taken it in the shorts from one of your own. Ted Hall is a real-life polymath and all-around good guy -- a vintner, a restaurateur, a conscientious cattle rancher, a respected business strategist, a sailor, a record producer, a trombonist -- who once sat on the boards of Williams-Sonoma and Peet’s Coffee.

That’s the ebullient Ted Hall, right, toasting his compatriots

I first met Ted about 2004 when he was advising Bob Mondavi through the sale of the latter’s winery. Hall always struck me as a very smart, realistic, down-to-earth and head-on-straight personage in your wine community.

Ted recently wrote a two-part treatise on his Substack newsletter, Tell the Truth & Do the Right Thing, in which he takes you, his neighbors, compatriots, colleagues, and friends to task for encumbering your Valley with too many wineries and tasting rooms. In Part II, Hall writes that Napa Valley’s marketing concentration – where once the focus was on visible and well-known UpValley wineries – has down-shifted to Napa town to the south of the Valley. Subsequently, UpValley wineries – too expensive and too “experiences-oriented” – are feeling the downturn more acutely.

Hall calls his journalistic essays, “The Great Napa Valley Overpour” (https://substack.com/@lmrone/p-189946398). To which another Substacker, Jim Silver, essentially agrees with Hall but extrapolates, “The problem isn’t demand, it’s dilution”. (https://jimsilver.substack.com/)

I’ve long thought that Napa Valley was steeped in a monoculture (read: Cabernet Sauvignon), with wines that were overpriced, and mired in sameness.

I know 2005 and ’06 was a generation ago, but the following is a good example to what I’m referring in the last word of the above paragraph: sameness.

As a featured writer for the short-lived and one of the first online wine magazines, Appellation America, it was our charge to differentiate the terroir of your Valley’s many AVAs.

We would bring your winemakers into our offices on Market Street in San Francisco from AVA A and blind-taste their wines, together. Save for a smattering stylistic differences and done-to-in-the-cellar wines truthfully, it was near-impossible to make terroir claims of difference.

And as we categorized and catalogued these wines as we went through tastings of every one of the Valley’s 13 AVAs at the time, I confess that even from region-to-region, discernment was challenging. Yes, we usually tasted the difference between hillside/mountain wines in relation to Valley-floor wines. Carneros wines, what with its cooler climate, naturally was different from wines from warmer Calistoga, 30 miles UpValley.

I’ve digressed here but the point I’m attempting to make is that if Napa Valley doesn’t try something courageous that’s a change from what heretofore had worked for about four decades, it will fall into what I’ll call Yankees-Duke-Canadiens Syndrome. That is, resting on one’s laurels, which after a time turns the vox-populi to become agitated and to eventually turn away because the championships have ceased coming. Otherwise, status quo will hurt your legacy.