Did You Make a Reservation?

By Patrick R. Dunn

The drive from Reno to San Francisco is supposed to take about four hours, and I almost never do it in four hours. Some days I come down Interstate 80 through the Placer County foothills, and some days I go the long way on California Highway 88 past Kirkwood and down into Amador County. Either way, once I'm out of the mountains I know the back roads, and if the day has any slack in it I take one. I have been doing this for years, on my own time, with no plan beyond seeing what's open and pouring. For most of the time I have been drinking wine, that was how wine country expected to be found.

The drive has changed. More of the gates now carry a small sign that says by appointment only, and most of the time I read it and keep driving. Once in a while, usually on a weekday, when the lot is close to empty and the afternoon is quiet, I pull in anyway and walk up to the door.

What happens next has happened to me more than once. The host looks up, and before anything like hello there is a look I have learned to recognize, and then the question. Did you make a reservation? I say I didn't, that I was driving through and hoped a weekday might be quiet enough. It is quiet enough. There is no one else in the room. I am still turned away, and I walk back to the car having spent a few minutes at a winery and none of my money. I have never gone back to any of them. There are too many wineries on that drive to give a second afternoon to one that sent me away from an empty room.

The other thing I see more often now is a gate with a call box. The gate is closed and locked, and the only way past it is to press a button and explain to a speaker on a post who I am and why I'm there. That one bothers me more than any appointment sign. I understand cameras, and I understand a winery with a long driveway and expensive equipment wanting to know who is on the property. A gate that stays locked through every hour the tasting room is open tells a guest the winery would rather not have visitors, however much wine that visitor might have bought. Most of the time I don't press the button. I turn around and go find a winery with an open gate.

The appointment sign went up for reasons that made sense at the time. The pandemic pushed wineries toward reservations, and when the restrictions lifted the reservation system stayed, because it let a winery schedule its staff to the bookings and give each seated guest a longer, more personal visit. At Ehlers Estate in St. Helena, which books every visit, guests spend $125 to $175 on average and usually buy at least three bottles. On a busy Saturday in October, with cars waiting for the same table, a reservation is the only fair way to run the room.

But the sign went up when wine country was full, and it isn't full anymore. Tasting room visits fell 18 percent in Napa County last year and about 8 percent in Sonoma County, according to Wine Business Monthly's annual survey, and Silicon Valley Bank, which has tracked the industry for decades, wrote this year that accessibility will be critical to rebuilding visitation. Some wineries have heard that. Before the pandemic, 70 percent of guests at Grgich Hills Estate walked in without a booking, and Grgich still takes both. Jonathan Wendorf of Sequoia Grove told Wine Enthusiast that the walk-in arrives with no expectations, which gives the winery its best chance at a club sign-up, and that a guest turned away at the door, "even if the winery is empty, it's a relationship lost."

It happens at large wineries and at small ones, though less often at the small ones, and during harvest I understand it at a small place. The person who would pour for me is usually doing two or three other jobs that day, and a reservation is how she gets through it. But if the door is open and the room is empty, a courtesy splash and an invitation to come back with a booking takes an ounce of wine and a minute of someone's time, and it is usually all the walk-in guest is hoping for.

Some hosts can't pour that splash because the sign is the law. In Napa, a county ordinance from 1990 limits tastings at most wineries approved since then to guests with an appointment made in advance, and smaller versions of the same rule turn up one winery at a time in the use permits of Sonoma and Amador. The ordinance was written to protect farmland, which is a reasonable thing to protect, but it was adopted when Napa had about 100 wineries and now governs more than 500. In August, Napa County supervisors held a hearing on easing the rules, and the change they seemed most open to was dropping the requirement to post the appointment-only sign, while leaving the appointment rule itself in place. Much of the rule is about traffic on rural roads. Once a car has come up the driveway, though, the traffic has already happened, and sending it back down only means the winery took the trip and lost the sale. Robin Baggett of Alpha Omega asked supervisors whether they really want to regulate how many people can come to his winery when the fire marshal says he can have more. The same question fits one couple at an empty counter on a Tuesday afternoon.

Even where the law says no, the host can still say why. I spent more than a decade as an interpretive ranger with the National Park Service, and the signs in the parks that people actually followed were the ones that explained themselves. The one at the beach didn't just say no dogs. It said shorebirds nest there in spring, and people who would have argued with the rule left the dog in the car. The campground sign that asked people not to cut trees for firewood explained that the forest needed its standing wood, and they went and bought a bundle at the camp store. A sign at a winery gate that says the county requires an appointment, with a number to call for one the same day, would send most drivers to the phone instead of back to the highway. I would make that call from the parking lot. A no without a reason is the one guests take personally.

What the winery loses at the door is hard to see from inside. Ted Hall, writing about Napa this summer, pointed out that walk-in traffic leaves no trace in reservation data, and a guest who is turned away leaves even less. There is no booking to cancel and no sale to refund, only a car pulling back onto the road and a driver who now knows to skip that turn. For a lot of travelers the conversation at the door is the only one they will ever have with that winery, and it lasts about thirty seconds and ends with no.

In Santa Rosa last week, Carol Shelton, who is making her last wines this year, was photographed by the Press Democrat greeting customers at her warehouse tasting room in a business park. A winemaker who is winding down is still at the door saying hello to whoever comes in, and plenty of wineries with years ahead of them have decided that on a weekday nobody needs to.

I still take the back roads. More often now I already know which gates I'm going to drive past.

Sources and notes. Kate Dingwall, "Are Reservation-Only Tasting Rooms Hurting Wineries?" Wine Enthusiast, September 14, 2026; Wine Business Monthly 2026 Tasting Room Survey, as reported by the Sonoma Index-Tribune; Silicon Valley Bank, 2026 State of the US Wine Industry Report; Barry Eberling, "Napa County supervisors eye possible wine country regulatory changes," Napa Valley Register, August 13, 2026; Napa County Code Section 18.08.620 and the Winery Definition Ordinance (1990); Sonoma County and Amador County use permit filings, 2023 and 2025; Alder Yarrow, "Napa Needs a New Kind of Governance," Vinography, March 2025; Ted Hall, "Napa Valley: A False Signal"; The Press Democrat, October 9, 2026. The turned-away visits described here are my own, on drives through Placer and Amador counties.