Why craft, sustainability and farming are Napa Valley's real luxuries

Arguably, no wine region – not Bordeaux, not Burgundy, not even Champagne – has pursued luxury as deliberately as Napa Valley.

When winemaker Ivo Jeramaz arrived from Croatia in 1986 to work alongside his uncle, Miljenko ‘Mike’ Grgich, Napa was a quieter, humbler and unmistakably agrarian place.

In the decades that followed, the region was transformed, he recalls.

An influx of outside capital ushered in showpiece wineries with chandeliered tasting rooms. The hot pursuit of 100-point scores introduced cult wines and tightly held allocations.

‘Napa became a very exclusive place,’ says Jeramaz – a region, and wines, defined by luxury, polish and power.

The model worked for a while, he says, but today it’s clear that it’s under strain.

Inflexion point

Signs pointing to an unprecedented market correction are unavoidable across Napa Valley.

Wine sales have slowed, leaving excess inventory in their wake. Layoffs and facility closures have become regular and climate volatility is an operational constant.

Confidence levels at Napa wineries are among the lowest of any major US wine region, according to a recent survey by Silicon Valley Bank.

At every turn, there’s talk of a reset – a new era for Napa framed in terms such as authenticity and accessibility.

Wineries are leaning into storytelling and digital outreach. Wine tastings are being recast as wellness experiences.

But beneath the tactical adjustments, there are signs of a deeper, more structural shift emerging, too.

In a region that has largely exhausted conventional markers of luxury, a more durable expression of prestige may lie in the vineyard itself.

Prestige reconsidered

For many growers, this recalibration begins with a correction of the narrative.

Annie Favia, the viticulturist and co-owner of Favia Wines, recoils slightly when I suggest that Napa can, at times, resemble a Disneyland for wine lovers.

‘Napa has this very shiny veneer,’ she says, ‘but underneath it, it’s always been about farming.’

The valley’s agricultural core, she argues, may have been overshadowed by a commercially sexier narrative of luxury, but its backbone, built on family-run estates and generational stewardship, never disappeared.

For Favia and her husband, winemaker Andy Erickson (of Screaming Eagle and Dalla Valle fame), farming has always come first.

Since 2012, they’ve produced wine from organic vineyards certified by California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), incorporating biodynamic and regenerative principles.

‘We’ve had our heads down, working towards this goal for over three decades,’ Favia says.

What feels different now, Erickson suggests, is the growing momentum around those principles. ‘[Now] we have a chance to be a voice in a new chapter for Napa,’ he says.

At Vine Hill Ranch, a heritage estate situated on the slopes of the Mayacamas mountain range in Oakville, Bruce Phillips (pictured, above) – whose family has grown wine grapes there since the late 1950s – poses the idea similarly. What if Napa’s new luxury was rooted in a grower movement?

It’s a question that points to Champagne as a reference – a reorientation of currency away from grandes maisons and brand marketing, and toward wines crafted by growers, site expression and generational stewardship of land and community.

These recalibrations align with broader cultural currents. The rise of quiet luxury in fashion, for example, displaced logos and overt displays of wealth with a renewed reverence for craft, origin and sustainability.

In Napa, sustainability has similarly emerged as a marker of changing value systems.

Translating that impulse into a cohesive movement, however, hasn’t been easy.

A greener Napa

Among many wine-growers, there’s a shared conviction – if any wine region should take the lead on stewardship, why not Napa?

It’s one of the world’s most prestigious wine regions, with some of the highest land prices and operating budgets in the world, explains Jeramaz.

‘And yet, we’ve pretended that what we put in the soil has no bearing on wine quality,’ he says.

Grgich Hills, along with pioneers such as Neal Family Vineyards and Spottswoode Winery, were among Napa’s earliest adopters of organic viticulture and the trio are the only estates in the valley to hold silver-level Regenerative Organic Certified status, a standard that extends beyond organic regulations to include things such as soil health metrics, biodiversity benchmarks and labour protections.

Jeramaz argues that Napa should be further along, with stronger commitments to organic certification, wider adoption of regenerative practices and a full ban on synthetic herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers.

Organic certification, often considered a baseline standard for meaningful sustainability, has grown in Napa, especially in recent years.

According to CCOF data, about 12.5% of Napa Valley’s vineyard acreage is certified organic.

The Napa County Department of Agriculture reports that there were 138 certified organic wine grape growers in Napa Valley in 2024.

Yet even those numbers may understate actual practice. Napa Valley Grapegrowers estimates that the number of organic grapegrowers would double if uncertified farms practising organic methods were included.

Long-term benefits

The pursuit of sustainability rarely follows a single blueprint in Napa. Cathy Corison (pictured, above) of Corison Winery farmed organically for nearly three decades before obtaining CCOF certification in 2023, prompted largely by her daughter Grace.

‘I started farming organically long before it was fashionable,’ explains Corison, recalling a time when the label could even be viewed as a liability.

Cost and administrative burdens delayed the decision, but her daughter’s influence helped Corison to understand the greater value and recognition that certification carries, particularly for the next generation.

Also, she says, a growing sense of greenwashing in the industry – when companies use terminology related to sustainability to make misleading, vague or exaggerated claims about the supposed environmental benefits of their own operations – made the decision feel timely.

Indeed, the idea of sustainability is increasingly central to Napa’s messaging, but it’s a notoriously elastic term lacking a consistent definition or standards.

As environmental virtue begins to function as prestige currency, the absence of cohesion leaves consumers navigating a wide spectrum of approaches, often with varying shades of greenwashing.

On one hand, certifications provide invaluable benchmarks for assessing and communicating farming practices, but on the other, debate persists over which standards carry the most weight, and how much legitimacy should be afforded to vineyards operating outside formal certification.

The sheer number of certifications and competing claims from wineries can be difficult for consumers to parse, acknowledges Caleb Mosley, the executive director of Napa Valley Grapegrowers.

Yet if the shared objective is the long-term health of soils, vines and the people who work the land, ‘the certification conversation might become a little more ancillary’, he suggests.

It’s possible that even imperfect or incremental moves toward sustainability, which are often dismissed as greenwashing, may still signal a shift in values.

Long-term view

If farming is indeed becoming the new marker of luxury in Napa, Joseph Phelps Vineyards offers one of its clearest expressions.

Following its sale to luxury group LVMH’s Moët Hennessy division in 2022, the estate launched one of the valley’s most ambitious regenerative projects to date.

Unveiled in 2024, the Borgo Project represents a sweeping redesign of vineyard systems around agroecology principles.

The initiative incorporates everything from an intensive study of soil health to hydrological mapping and the creation of ecological corridors to restore biodiversity.

The plan operates on a capital-heavy, nine-year horizon before wines even reach the market.

CEO David Pearson describes the Borgo Project as ‘a new paradigm and a new basis for agriculture in Napa’, a model he hopes others in the region will follow.

Pearson is candid that he doesn’t intend to pursue third-party certification. The goal of the project, he says, was always to produce the best possible wines.

Certifications, he argues, neither guarantee that outcome nor necessarily align with the estate’s specific needs.

Building resilience

The Borgo Project underscores a reality many growers face – cost remains a significant barrier to structural change.

Regenerative certification, for example, requires paying all workers, including seasonal grape pickers, a set living wage – a minimum in Napa of roughly $36 an hour, instead of the more typical $20-$25, explains Aron Weinkauf, winemaker and vineyard manager at Spottswoode.

The upfront costs are high, acknowledges Spottswoode’s president and CEO Beth Novak (pictured, above).

‘[But] we look at it as an optimisation of profit rather than a maximisation,’ she says.

Over time, those investments amount to business resilience, Novak explains – a healthier environment, as well as longer-lived vines that require fewer inputs, less labour and ultimately, lower operating costs.

‘You make those investments because you intend to be here decades from now,’ she says.

Napa is in a tough place right now, Napa Valley Grapegrowers’ Mosley acknowledges, but it’s a reset that has offered clarity, ‘recalibrating toward people making not only positive business decisions, but positive viticultural and land-use decisions, too’.

Approaches to a greener, more resilient future for Napa will vary, as will the metrics used to assess them.

Ideally, what will endure is a fundamental shift in values and a return to farming as the region’s most credible expression of identity.

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