Napa Watershed: preserve or plant?

Posted by: Roland Dumas

Napa Watershed: preserve or plant? - 02-21-2018 09:16:11

Napa is in a perpetual struggle to exploit vs preserve. 50 years ago, amid a very heated debate, the valley proper was put into an agricultural preserve, preventing converting vineyards into housing. Properties in the Ag Preserve are allowed to do ag things only, though there is a debate as to whether entertainment and convention facilities and faux castles qualify as 'ag'.

The areas in the hills are not part of the Ag Preserve, but are in an area that is AWOS - Agriculture, Watershed, and Open Space. There are areas that are watershed woodlands, oak forests that provide lost of services, such as recharging the aquifer that everyone relies on, reducing erosion, etc.

There is a fight going on now, whether to allow the large corporations to buy the watershed woodlands and cut them down for more vineyard plantings. A couple of well financed operations are targeting thousands of acres of watershed woodlands for new vineyards.

Some questions:
- Let the market decide; if they can buy the oak forests, they can do as they please?
- Preserve the watersheds and make them off limits to development?
- Would it affect your wine purchases if you knew the producer was environmentally aggressive?

My view is obvious. I live on the Napa River which has a huge burden of silt from vineyards flowing down to the bay. As one colleague says, the terroir should be on the hills and not in the river.
Posted by: Florida Jim

Re: Napa Watershed: preserve or plant? - 02-21-2018 12:19:23

Roland,
My first thought is not about new vineyards but about how changes to these lands would effect and would be effected by fire. Although the recent fires we’re unprecedented for their urban destruction, I wonder how changing the land use would impact the next time the fires rage.
Certainly, there is a repeating pattern to the return of the fires. Might be nice to plan a little . . .
Best, Jim
Posted by: Roland Dumas

Re: Napa Watershed: preserve or plant? - 02-22-2018 10:50:40

First safety is actually pretty complicated. A vineyard is actually a decent fire break usually, though there was a case of the vineyard being unburned and a house in the middle of the vineyard burning to the ground.

In the bigger picture, however, the location of the vineyard is more fire safe, but the area around it might be more at risk. Fire is mostly propagated by grass burning. It burns fast and moves through. I have a rather large set of photos showing that the oaks burned from the bottom up, and tend to be fire resilient. They look pretty bad, but most come back.

An oak forest does a couple of things that reduce fire danger. First, it actually cools the air under the canopy. It reduces the amount of grass growing under the canopy also. Oaks feed the aquifer, which seeps out in springs that keep riparian areas and some hillsides green and slow burning. Removing oaks causes water table to fall; planting a vineyard in its place causes it to fall more because the vineyards are sucking water up for irrigation.

So, net net. The specific location of a vineyard is more fire safe, but the neighborhood experiences more risk.