Wine Country growing pains hit home in Paso Robles

Paso Robles looks like it’s getting its first real dose of Wine Country growing pains.

The usually sleepy community in San Luis Obispo County jolted into a frenzy of controversy recently when Paso’s Justin Winery cleared 100 acres of oak trees from a property on Sleepy Farm Road in order to construct a large reservoir to develop a vineyard there. It’s a controversy whose themes will sound familiar to residents of Napa and Sonoma.

“We’ve never seen anything of this scale and magnitude,” says Matt Trevisan of Linne Calodo Cellars, which is near the contested site. Trevisan discovered the oak removal on May 27 by happenstance while flying overhead in a helicopter. “I looked down and said, ‘Whoa, what is happening here?’” he recalls. “It was startling.” The before-and-after Google Earth images, now widely circulated, tell the whole story: lush, green forest before; bald, beige earth after.

Justin is possibly Paso Robles’ highest-profile winery. In 2011, founders Justin and Deborah Baldwin sold the winery to the Wonderful Company — the luxury-ag corporation whose brands include Fiji Water, Pom juice and Wonderful Pistachios (remember the Stephen Colbert commercials?). Wonderful owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick (estimated net worth: $4.2 billion), who admit to violating their land-use permit, almost certainly incurred more wrath for the oak removal and reservoir construction than the average Paso landowner might have. The narrative was obvious: Beverly Hills billionaires invade Paso Robles, ruthlessly devastate forests and greedily gulp all of the West Side’s water. (Paso has gotten just 13 inches of rain in the last 12 months.)

The community took to social media to condemn Justin’s actions. Their voices were heard: On June 24, the Resnicks issued a formal apology. “We were asleep at the wheel,” they wrote. “We are horrified by the lack of regard for both neighbor and nature that has been exhibited.” As amends, they promised to dedicate the 380-acre property to conservation and plant 5,000 new oaks elsewhere.

Removing oaks on your property, by the way, is legal in Paso; Justin’s permit violations hinged on the slope grading and the project’s timing. But to the community, the gravity of the offense transcended its legality. Justin president David Ricanati concedes: “We’ve come to the conclusion that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”

Amid the controversy, talks of an oak ordinance in Paso Robles have revived. To some, this is a puzzling development. “Paso Robles is known for being a bunch of rugged individualists,” says Ancient Peaks Winery co-owner Doug Filipponi, whose family has been in Paso for generations. “We’re renegades.”

The property-rights impulse runs deep here, and historically it has often squashed proposals for sweeping land-use regulations. Past oak ordinances have failed. Just months ago, voters rejected the creation of a water district — fairly standard in parched areas of California — in (no pun intended) a landslide. The city of Paso Robles won’t even join the county’s library system.

But now, in the wake of the Justin scandal, it looks very likely that some form of tree ordinance will gain serious momentum.

“It all becomes very Ayn Randian,” says Skylar Stuck, general manager of Halter Ranch Winery. “Be careful exactly what you want the government telling you to do on your property.”

A cry for more regulation, a push for conservation, a backlash against vineyard development: The debate in Paso right now is starting to sound a lot like those that have dominated public discourse in Napa and Sonoma for decades.

For example, in Napa, a proposal by a large company to clear a forest for vineyard development — Hall Winery’s Walt Ranch project — was recently “tentatively approved” after a decade of resistance. (Final word is expected at the end of July; appeals will almost certainly follow.)

“The scale of opposition has been surprising to me,” says Hall president Mike Reynolds. Objectors claimed that Walt Ranch would clear too many trees, compromise the watershed and pose erosion concerns. The approved version of Walt Ranch represents at least a 33 percent reduction of Hall’s original proposal. “Now, we’re retaining more than 90 percent of the trees of the property, and at least 525 acres of woodland habitat is going to be placed in conservation easements,” Reynolds says.

Napa Valley’s regulation is particularly stringent: It has the country’s first-ever agricultural preserve, established in 1968, which designates agriculture as “the highest and best use” of this special soil. Napa was heeding a cautionary tale: “When they did the ag preserve,” explains Diane Dillon, a Napa County supervisor, “it was because they were looking at Santa Clara Valley.”

Before it became Silicon Valley, Santa Clara was a leading fruit producer, in both quality and quantity. “Santa Clara had luscious, beautiful soil for growing fruit, worldwide acclaimed fruit,” says Dillon. San Jose was the world’s largest center of dried-fruit packing and canning prior to World War II. Only in the 1950s did another of its natural resources — silicon — begin displacing orchards as the county’s defining industry. In 1949, the crop report lists 81,780 harvested acres of fruit trees in Santa Clara County; in 2014, just 1,208 were harvested. The apricot tree — once that valley’s signature, its Cabernet Sauvignon — took up 18,266 acres in 1949, and just 203 in 2014.

Napa’s ag preserve was insurance against this path. But it has also made grape-growing in Napa a more convoluted and bureaucratic enterprise than anywhere in the country.

In Paso, the Resnicks’ project on Sleepy Farm Road may have been opportunistic — its sub-AVA, Willow Creek, can produce beautiful wines — but in Napa, expansion today is mostly driven by an exhaustion of options. There’s simply nowhere left to go. The valley virtually is planted to capacity, so vineyard development creeps to hillsides, which carry a distinct set of concerns from the valley floor — especially erosion — and must answer to the ag preserve and watershed.

As renegade Paso contemplates this oak ordinance, Napa Valley confronts a fully realized tension between those who believe its agriculture is over-regulated and those who believe it is under-regulated. New resorts going up in Calistoga have residents worried about water use — but cities like Calistoga depend on transient occupancy taxes from tourists. Traffic on Highway 29 has residents in an uproar — but the allure of tasting wine in Napa generates $13 billion for the county every year. Can you have your cake of a peaceful bucolic existence and eat the financial rewards too?

At the heart of Napa’s dilemma, now in messy post-pubescence, and Paso’s own problem, still in its infancy, is this: The land gets protected because it is valuable. But the more valuable it gets, the greater the financial temptations are to develop it.

The Resnicks themselves are a barometer of value. “When the Resnicks purchased Justin, it was a sign that Paso Robles has become a very serious wine region,” says Kevin Sass, Halter Ranch’s winemaker (and a former Justin winemaker, under the Baldwins’ ownership). “But at the same time, it brought in larger corporations that might not know how our community has always operated.”

One contingent’s sentiment: Can’t we just work it out on our own? “But trusting that everyone will do the right thing is probably not an adequate development policy,” says Jason Haas of Tablas Creek Winery.

Others point out that clearing trees in Paso isn’t exactly a novelty. Long ago, vineyards displaced walnut orchards, apple orchards, open cattle land. “There’s a lack of perspective,” says Jim Irving, a local real estate broker and county planning commissioner. “When you drive around, you see a lot of trees that have double and triple trunks — trees that were all clear-cut 100 years ago, when Paso had a charcoal plant.”

But the Resnicks come with more baggage: They’re big, and they’re not locals. At the same time, their power means increased publicity — and increased value — for the region as a whole. Ricanati offers a gentle reminder: “We’re proud to be out on the road talking about Paso Robles all over the country. We’re an ambassador in New York, Chicago, Miami.”

Are these growing pains inevitable? Or do they suggest a model of wine-region development that is somehow untenable in contemporary, resource-scarce California?

“I’m a property-rights person,” says Trevisan. “But if you don’t do something, there won’t be any property to protect.”

Absent land-use regulations, do you go the way of Santa Clara Valley?

“I doubt that you will see any more oaks cleared for a hundred miles now,” says Filipponi. “And now, hopefully, Justin will make it right, and we’ll go back to doing what we do, which is trying to make a living in the wine business.”