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Placer County wineries look to grow tourist trade |
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Written by John McCreadie
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Jan Decker, executive director of the state’s Welcome Center and chief executive officer of the Placer County Visitors Council, spoke at the Aug. 26 supervisor’s meeting, noting that “wineries and tasting rooms are synonymous with tourism.” Photo by John McCreadie.
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Local vintners – the first to make wine in Placer County since the Prohibition Era when they began nearly 10 years ago – applaud the efforts of the Board of Supervisors with its passage of a winery ordinance Aug. 26 and see the new county guidelines as an important step to helping create a wine region that draws tourists to the area.
“We need to make this area a destination for travelers,” said Fawnridge Winery co-owner Stephanie Perry. “There are people who want to visit area wineries. They come for the experience. People in the city want to get away to the country.”
Local businesses and organizations couldn’t be more supportive, and many see the supervisors’ unanimous 5-0 vote as a nod to both the agricultural community and local tourism. Small business owners of motels and restaurants to art galleries and museums understand the need to attract more tourists to the area to help bring additional dollars into the small-business community.
Jan C. Decker, who serves as both executive director of the state’s Welcome Center and chief executive officer of the Placer County Visitors Council, spoke at the supervisors’ meeting. His efforts, funded largely through the municipality’s Transient Occupancy Tax, are all about bringing tourist dollars into the area.
“Wineries and tasting rooms are synonymous with tourism,” he told the supervisors as he urged them to pass the winery ordinance.
Angela Tahti, executive director of PlacerArts, is another local business leader interested in supporting the effort by wineries to grow tourism in the county. She partners with local vintners to jointly market the annual Autumn Art Studios Tour and the Placer County Fall Winery Tour. Both events take place on the same weekend in November and attract people from outside the area.
“Both wine and art represent original products of Placer County,” said Tahti. “By working together, we are a larger force and many of our clients are the same people.”
In recent years, the local winery industry has struggled to gain traction in the county to help build a “wine trail” in the region. About two years ago, the county passed a law that allows farms and other businesses to provide county signs in rural areas. Those signs, popularized in Napa and Sonoma Counties, can help direct out-of-area travelers to off-road businesses.
While about 10 wineries have painstakingly led the effort to create a wine region in the last decade here in Placer County, a few new wineries have opened more recently, including Rancho Roble Vineyard & Winery in Lincoln. Racecar champion Scott Pruett also is betting the area will become the “next great winemaking region” and is transforming his 40-acre rural Auburn property into a vineyard.
Throughout the two-year-plus process to get the winery ordinance approved, local vintners – many of whom received local, national and international awards for their wines – displayed the early ordinances used in other counties that have since found success in building wine regions, including Nevada and El Dorado Counties.
“They all had ordinances early on that supported reasonable growth for their industry,” said Teena Wilkins, co-owner of Viña Castellano Winery. “Now we can focus on building a wine trail in Placer County.”
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