Napa wine tasting fees are more than twice as expensive as 6 years ago. Here’s why (2024)

• Read more: Has Wine Country become too expensive for its own good?

Surging inflation, coupled with longer-term issues like a labor shortage, wildfires and supply-chain disruptions, has exploded the cost of doing business in the Napa wine industry, and some wineries are beginning to pass those costs along to their customers.

But the rising prices aren’t yet deterring customers from visiting — and spending money in — America’s most famous wine region. “We’re experiencing higher than ever demand,” said Hugh Davies, owner of Calistoga’s Schramsberg Vineyards. “The reality is that people are drinking wine.”

Yet vintners say even though they’re upping their prices, they’re pocketing less money. “Inflation is impacting the wine producers, but they aren’t passing on the full impact of price increases to consumers,” said Rob McMillan, executive vice president of Silicon Valley Bank’s Wine Division. “They are making lower margins.”

The swelling consumer price index isn’t the only factor informing wine costs. Many of the most powerful determinants predate 2022. A labor shortage means employers are paying higher salaries. Supply chain hold-ups have resulted in escalating costs for goods like glass bottles, the price of which doubled in some cases. Serial wildfires have shot up insurance rates — Schramsberg’s annual premium went from $200,000 to more than $800,000, Davies said — and their threat requires constant maintenance of defensible space, another costly line item.

Now, inflation is adding to all of those troubles.

“As a businessperson you never want to raise prices,” said Lee Hudson, owner of Napa’s Hudson Vineyards, where a wine tasting now costs $95, up from $65 a year ago. But that price hike, and the fact that sales are higher than they’ve ever been, still can’t keep pace with the soaring cost of doing business, he said. “We’re making less money.”

“The overhead is crushing us,” said Maria Helm Sinskey, co-owner of Robert Sinskey Vineyards, which operates a popular tasting room along the Silverado Trail. The winery recently raised its main tasting option, which includes seven pours of wine, from $50 to $65.

One of the fastest-rising expenses at Robert Sinskey Vineyards, which owns all of its vineyard land, is farming. That makes it especially sensitive to shifts in the labor market, fuel prices and the cost of vehicles like tractors and trucks. On top of that, the company farms organically, which typically necessitates more expensive crop treatments.

A survey of The Chronicle’s Top Wineries in Napa Valley guide reveals that modest tasting-fee increases were common during the past year. Calistoga’s Lola Wines charges $35 now, up from $25 in spring 2021. Saintsbury in Carneros rose from $35 to $40. Hendry Ranch, at the base of Mount Veeder, grew from $40 to $50.

At a few outlier wineries, the fees soared even higher. Hudson’s $65-to-$95 bump is one example. Another is mountaintop estate Antica Napa Valley, whose tasting rose from $45 to $75. (Antica did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

If $75 sounds like a lot for a wine tasting, it’s still less than the CellarPass average of $82.26 for a top-flight wine experience, And so far, customers seem more than willing to shell out.

At the highest end, Napa’s most luxurious wine estates can now command $500 or more per person. The proliferation of these pricier tastings is not merely a reflection of rising costs; it’s also an indication of the changing nature of the wine tasting itself. The once-commonplace Wine Country setting of a casual, walk-in tasting bar is nearing extinction, replaced by one-on-one sessions with table service, cheese boards and personalized menus. The truly fancy ones offer flashy features like caviar, cooking classes, even rides in vintage airplanes.

This shift began before the pandemic. “By 2019 nearly all tasting rooms offered what are considered ‘elevated’ experiences lasting at least 90 minutes and often including a food element of some sort,” said CellarPass co-founder Sarah Elliman.

When wineries began reopening for visitors after the pandemic’s initial shutdown, more estates moved to an appointment-only model in order to control the number of customers they saw (and also, in some cases, to enable contact tracing). As pandemic restrictions have loosened, however, the reservation requirement has not. Now, virtually all Napa wineries require advance booking.

“2021 showed that wine-tasting reservations along with triple-digit tasting fees were here to stay,” Elliman said. “There is no sign of this trend slowing down.”

At Robert Sinskey Vineyards, making the reservation-only policy permanent was partly a result of not being able to hire enough employees. “We’ve really tried to limit the number of people coming in because of staffing issues,” said Maria Helm Sinskey.

Other wineries saw that by restricting appointments, and charging a higher fee, they could filter out the casual partyer who just wants to sling back a few drinks. A higher tasting fee self-selects for customers who are likely to buy more bottles of wine at the end of their session — which is, after all, any winery’s main objective.

“We don’t see hundreds of people — we only see 45 to 50 people a week,” said Hudson. “The tasting fee is the price of entry. We need to make sure it’s serious people who are coming to visit us.” He said Hudson justifies its fee by hiring talented tasting-room hosts, whom he tries to pay “at the top of the market.”

While tasting fees are rising, so are wine bottle prices. Seventy-two percent of wineries selling bottles costing over $25 said they were going to raise prices this year, according to data from Silicon Valley Bank. “But the price increase was expected to be small,” McMillan said, “and certainly less than the 9% inflation number that was just announced.”

As inflation continues, it won’t be the upscale Napa estates like Hudson, Schramsberg and Robert Sinskey that will be hurt the most, said McMillan, but rather the producers of inexpensive, mass-market wines.

“Prices in the under-$11 segment in grocery aren’t increasing,” said McMillan. Unlike the boutique producers in Napa, he said, the big-volume wineries “aren’t keeping up with inflation.”

Schramsberg’s plans for its bottle prices follow this logic. The winery will step up its top wine, the J. Schram, from $130 to $140 per bottle when it releases the next vintage, Davies said. But its Blanc de Blancs cuvee, which currently costs $42, will rise only $1.

He said he hopes to resist further increases as long as he can, but given how quickly his costs are rising, “I do scratch my head and wonder if we shouldn’t be more aggressive.”

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley