Project Notes We began research for 'The Napa Wine Project' on November 12, 2006. This project involves personally tasting at all Napa Valley Wineries who grant us a visit (Walk-In, Appointment Only, Virtual & Private Wineries), as well as Napa area businesses providing tasting experiences, (Collectives and Wine Bars). We have personally visited over 470 Napa Wineries to date and have been tasting at Napa wineries 2 to 3x a week until the present with several international travel breaks built in to our schedule. We expect the entire initial project to take 3 years. Any wineries that we have not yet visited with out of the 730+ (and growing!) Napa based businesses producing wine in our database (see bottom of this page for complete database), will be contacted via phone, email (or both) to request a tasting.     Private Wineries We include all Private wineries we taste with, but these wineries do not receive visitors at all so we have not highlighted the actual 'tasting experience', rather we focus on their history, the wine/tasting notes, information about the winery and where you can find their wines. Our reviews of private wineries are exclusively posted on this website. Addresses are left out of our private winery reviews and phone numbers may also be left out upon request. Printed Guide As soon as we complete the initial content gathering for this project we will promote the online version through a variety of local and national media sources. We are currently developing a printed guide for distribution at select locations in and around Napa Valley (Spas, Restaurants, Resorts, Chambers). The published guide will be advertising driven based on non-winery advertisements from businesses located mostly within the Napa Valley and will be updated 2x/year. This printed guide will only include walk-in and select appointment only wineries - all private wineries listed on this website will be referenced to in the printed guide. Interested in advertising in this guide? Email dave@pon.net Updating This is a major time intensive process which we continue to do on an almost daily basis. We subscribe to a number of mailing lists for individual Napa wineries, we attend trade tastings and educational events and in addition we revisit a number of wineries for updates. Thank You We want to thank all Napa Wineries who have been so gracious with providing tasting and winery information. Sometimes the Napa area gets a bad rap for being overly pretentious and high-class - but in our experience the vast majority of the wineries (especially the smaller ones) are not like this at all.

Winery Visits - In regards to visits, wineries fall into three categories:
Open to the Public - simply walk in during normal business hours;   Open by Appointment - there is a huge range in this category. Some wineries are setup to take larger     groups and may have tours, some are so small the tastings may be at their house and they do not     encourage visitors unless you are a serious wine enthusiast. You may taste with a group of people     outside of your party or taste with just your party (depends on wineries' policy);   Private - the winery is not open to the public and they do not receive visitors at all. We leave out     addresses for private wineries unless they have P.O. boxes. We clearly label the "private wineries" in our reviews. When reviewing our winery descriptions under our "Quick Info" section (see example to the right), we note whether the winery is a walk-in, appointment only or private - if additional visit details are needed, these will also be provided in this section.

Our initial visits were to walk-in wineries and our descriptions for these tend to be more experiential in nature. For any walk-in wineries with short descriptions we are conducting revisits for additional content. Some of the appointment only wineries are only setup to receive very small numbers of serious wine enthusiasts - the tastings may be at the owners home, the winemaker is the owner/only employee & their time is limited.

Winery Lists & Database There are numerous printed and online Napa winery lists floating around. The best printed one we have seen to date is the Preiser Key which is available for free at select Napa wineries and in the local Chamber of Commerce offices. Appellation America has the best updated online list of Napa Wineries - as well as all USA based wineries. Also take a look at the intriguing and often humorous Moveable Thirst, a book by two men who visit 141 open to the public tasting rooms in Napa Valley. You can think of our project as "Moveable Thirst on Steroids". TWCC has good information about the history & ownership of many Napa Wineries. Napa Links has about 165 Napa Wineries listed each containing a short description provided by the actual winery. It is extremely difficult to come up with an exact number of "wineries" in the Napa Valley. First you have to define what qualifies as a "winery". Visit the TTB's winery definition page for more information. Consider the following types of wineries:

  Physically Bonded (an actual winery facility - may even be a house/garage winery). One winery may have multiple bonded locations.
  Alternating Proprietors - winery/custom crush facility has a bond that allows participating custom crush clients to have their own
    "bonded winery" within the main winery
  Custom Crush wineries - these "virtual" wineries do not have their own winery, rather they rent space from an actual winery. Tastings
    may be given at the actual custom crush winery or at a physical site apart from the custom crush facility (i.e., a collective, home, etc)

Napa Winery List Notes: We have compiled a spread sheet of 730+ businesses (with contact information & other details) in Napa Valley producing wine commercially. This extensive list is based on hours and hours of research and continuous updating. Our database includes the top 3 bulleted items in the above list plus a separate section for collectives. This lengthy list was amassed by referencing 30+ already printed & online winery lists including the TTB and ABC. Furthermore, we physically have visited almost all wine shops in Napa county with pen and paper and jot down any unfamiliar labels. We revisit wine shops from time to time for updates - the highlight of this wine shop visiting is always JV Warehouse in Napa with their huge by Napa standards, ever changing selection! We also visit each one of the winery websites (if available) - if no website is available we call the winery to make sure they are in business. Wine forums are also an excellent resource for new releases and new Napa wineries. Lastly we visit select public and trade only tastings.

One winery may have several different "labels", especially the larger wineries and a label may be from a vintner who does not have an actual winery. If one winery produces multiple labels we have not listed them twice, rather we have listed their labels under the parent winery listing. Napa wineries who taste at area collectives or tasting bars have been listed with their parent collective as well as having there own listing.

The master winery list below contains wineries who must make & bottle their wine in Napa County and in addition, must use grapes from the Napa Appellation for at least one of their wines. Several case by case exceptions are noted in the database in the "notes" column denoted by the red # symbol. Out of 730+ wineries on our list, we estimate about 40% are walk-in or appointment only and the other 60% are private and are not setup to see visitors.