Wine X Staff
Wine X Magazine Online Edition
This is the first article in a series of three
The wine is still extraordinary. Experiencing it has become more scheduled, more regulated and more expensive. Then the wineries went to court.
There was a version of Napa where you could wake up on Saturday, point the rental car north, stop when something looked interesting and spend the day discovering wine.
Maybe you called ahead. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe somebody behind the bar realized you actually liked the weird stuff and disappeared into the back to find a bottle that wasn’t technically on the tasting list.
There were appointments, certainly. There were expensive wineries. There were places with gates, security codes and architectural ambitions normally associated with Bond villains.
But the valley still had some looseness to it. A little serendipity. Wine was the reason you were there.
That looseness is harder to find now. Napa in 2026 requires a calendar.
Visit Napa Valley now advises travelers to book well in advance because popular wineries can fill up weeks ahead. It notes that some wineries have permit restrictions limiting the number of guests they can receive each day and that many tastings begin and end at fixed times. Its current recommendation is two or three wineries per day, in part because many experiences now take at least 90 minutes.
Two. Maybe three. We’re planning Cabernet like elective surgery.
And then there is the price.
Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 direct-to-consumer research found the average Napa tasting fee reported for 2025 was $79. Nearly 30% of Napa wineries said they had lowered some tasting prices as tourism weakened, yet that average declined by only a dollar.
A couple tasting together can be $158 into the day before buying a bottle, tipping anybody, eating lunch or discovering that the hotel room costs approximately what their first car did.
In June 2025, Napa hotel rooms averaged about $440 a night even as occupancy remained well below 2019 levels.
Some of modern Napa’s friction comes from the market, not the County. Let’s establish that immediately.
Luxury positioning, higher labor and insurance costs, staggering land values and consumer willingness to pay all pushed the valley in the same direction. Some wineries intentionally left the old tasting-bar model because seated hospitality produced better conversion, bigger purchases and stronger club enrollment.
Those forces explain part of the modern Napa experience. They do not explain the regulatory system documented in Napa County’s own court filings. That’s the subject of this series.
Napa built an increasingly controlled land-use and enforcement system governing when, how and under what conditions wineries can receive people. That system did not invent the $79 tasting or the $440 hotel room. It did help shape an operating environment in which access is increasingly managed, capacity is precious and spontaneity gets expensive. And it has become the center of one of the strangest wine fights in America.
MEET LINDSAY HOOPES
If you know the Hoopes Vineyard story, congratulations. You can skip ahead and save several hundred words. If you don’t, here’s the short version.
Lindsay Hoopes acquired a winery property near Yountville that operated under a small-winery exemption dating to 1984. Napa County’s position was that the property’s historical entitlement allowed wine production and certain sales, but did not authorize the tours, tastings and other activities Hoopes later conducted.
Hoopes and Napa disagreed over what the property was entitled to do. The disagreement escalated. Spectacularly.
Napa sued in 2022. After a 10-day trial, the County won round one in Superior Court.
By January 2026, the judgment against Hoopes, related entities and Lindsay Hoopes personally totaled $3,960,013.05, including $1.525 million in civil penalties and more than $2.4 million in fees, abatement costs and other expenses.
Hoopes appealed. That matters. The permanent injunction is stayed while the appeal proceeds; the monetary judgment is not. So the trial-court ruling is real, but it is not the end of the fight. The battle continues in the California Court of Appeal.
Nearly four million dollars. That’s not a zoning disagreement anymore. That’s a life event.
THEN HOOPES STOPPED BEING JUST ABOUT HOOPES
Two other wineries became involved. Summit Lake Vineyards & Winery. Smith-Madrone.
Both have histories predating Napa’s modern 1990 Winery Definition Ordinance. And both came to believe that questions raised by the Hoopes fight reached beyond Hoopes.
That matters because older wineries present a strange problem. Their legal rights can depend not only on what today’s County Code says but on what their permits said decades ago, what activities legally existed before later rules took effect and what rights survived those regulatory changes.
Napa knew this could be complicated before the modern ordinance even existed. In its current federal discovery responses, the County acknowledges that a 1989 memorandum from its own Chief Deputy County Counsel discussed recognition of legal nonconforming status for certain prior uses at pre-WDO wineries.
So Hoopes, Summit Lake and Smith-Madrone went to federal court.
Their lawsuit challenges aspects of Napa’s winery regulations and enforcement practices under several constitutional theories. Napa denies the allegations.
A federal judge initially dismissed or stayed much of the case. Then, in April, the Ninth Circuit revived significant portions.
The appeals court did not rule that Napa had violated the Constitution. But it held that Summit Lake and Smith-Madrone had adequately alleged standing at that stage to pursue several pre-enforcement constitutional claims, and it reinstated their First Amendment retaliation claims. Hoopes’ separate retaliation damages claim was also revived.
So the case came back. And then things got more interesting.
NOW TWO VINEYARD OWNERS WANT IN
On September 17, Thomson Vineyards and Okell Hill Vineyards asked the federal court for permission to join the lawsuit.
That motion has not yet been granted. Their allegations have not been adjudicated. Napa County has not yet responded to the proposed claims. All important caveats.
But here’s why their appearance matters.
These are not simply two more established wineries complaining that they can’t hold enough tastings. They are vineyard owners pursuing winery development and permitting, and their proposed claims arise from their own interactions with Napa’s land-use and code-enforcement system involving both their vineyards and prospective winery operations.
That’s a meaningful broadening of the voices asking for judicial help.
First: Hoopes. Then: two historic wineries. Now: two vineyard owners trying to navigate the system as they pursue future winery operations.
At some point the story becomes bigger than whether Lindsay Hoopes was allowed to pour somebody a glass of wine.
WHICH BRINGS US TO THE REALLY GOOD PART
In August, lawyers for the wineries asked Napa County a long series of questions in federal discovery. Not rhetorical questions. Formal legal questions.
What is a public tasting? What’s private? What’s an event? What can a small winery do? What can an old winery do? How does Napa determine historical rights? What role does the County’s winery database play? How does enforcement happen?
Napa answered.
And the answers are extraordinary.
Not because Napa suddenly confessed to some grand conspiracy. It didn’t. Not because the wineries automatically win their case. They don’t.
They’re extraordinary because they expose just how complicated the rules behind the modern Napa experience have become.
Rules governing tasting. Food. Hospitality. Events. Appointments. Visitor counts. Historical uses. Even crackers.
And once you read Napa explaining Napa, the reservation calendars, expensive tasting models and highly choreographed winery visit begin to look a little different.
So that’s where we’re going next. Napa County explaining its own rules. Try to keep up We tried.
NEXT UP: NAPA EXPLAINS NAPA
