If you are a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon aficionado, expect to pay ever-higher prices for your favored wine. The price of Napa Cabernet grapes from the 2016 harvest was $6,943 per ton, 11% higher than the previous vintage. Over the hill in Sonoma, Cabernet brought $2,954 per ton. Sonoma’s priciest grape is Pinot Noir at $3,669. Overall average price for Napa wine grapes was $4,666 per ton, Sonoma $2,585, Lake County $1,664, Mendocino $1,532. The average for all varieties in these four counties was $2,955, an increase of 5.8% from 2015.
What does the future look like? Marijuana, of course!
The eighty acres in Mendocino County where Fetzer Vineyards planted its first vines is being sold. Bernard and 
Kathleen Fetzer released their first vintage in 1968. The new owner is Flow Kana, a firm that promotes its branded marijuana products as sustainably produced and “sun-grown.” Mendocino County is in the middle of the world-renowned – among cognoscenti – marijuana-farming region known as the “Emerald Triangle.”
Bernard and Kathleen Fetzer released their first vintage in 1968. Thirty years later, they moved their winemaking operation from Redwood Valley, north of Ukiah, twenty miles south to Hopland, south of Ukiah. (Hopland is also home to the Bluebird Café, solar-energy pioneer Real Goods, and where California’s first brewpub, Mendocino Brewing, started.)
Fetzer has been sold a couple times. Current owner, Concha y Toro, based in Santiago Chile, purchased the winery from Brown-Forman Co. in 2011.
For years, cannabis has been a major cash crop in northern coastal California. With recent legalization, there have been several other land purchases in the Emerald Triangle, with new owners planning to grow the herb.
Just for fun…
