The Napa County Agricultural Preserve: Fifty Years as a Foundation of America’s Premier Wine Region

In 1968, Napa County, California, created an agricultural preserve of 23,000 acres zoned for agriculture, wineries, and houses with a large minimum lot size of twenty acres. Over time, the agricultural preserve was expanded to 32,000 acres and the zoning tightened to a forty-acre minimum lot size. Concerns about nonfarm development and marketing activities at wineries compelled county voters to pass three referenda that limited population growth in the countryside and required a countywide vote for any zoning changes in the agricultural preserve. Thanks in part to the agricultural preserve, Napa County became America’s most famous wine-producing region