Free Republic

With the proliferation of bureaucrats in leftist-run California, they're descending like locusts onto the farms of not just California's lower Central Valley, but now the Napa Valley and its wine makers, according to the U.K. Daily Mail. The farmers are swatting back. The Daily Mail reports:Napa Valley's prestigious wineries have launched a revolt against 'abusive' county officials, accusing bureaucrats of killing the region's famous vineyards with absurd and excessive red tape.Wealthy vintners say they are being 'crushed' by 'gross regulatory overreach', which has included penalizing wineries for planting trees, making jam and conducting wine tastings on their own land.One vineyard...

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been accused of hiring a private lawyer she was in a 'romantic' relationship with to prosecute Donald Trump, according to a stunning filing by one of the former president's co-defendants. The bombshell allegations are included in a filing by Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official who is accused of taking part in the 'fake electors' scheme as one of 18 people charged in the state along with Trump. The public court filing, which seeks the dismissal of charges against him, alleges that Willis was in a personal relationship with private lawyer Nathan...

*** Nobody on either side of the political aisle understands what Fulton County DA Fani Willis was thinking when she hired her reported boyfriend, a personal injury lawyer with zero high-profile felony trial experience, to be the lead special prosecutor in what is likely the biggest case of her career. Nor do people understand why she’d blur her personal and professional life by jetting off for a $2,600 cruise and romantic trip to California’s Napa Valley with still legally married Wade while working on the sprawling and complex racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and his allies. But Willis’...

Lizzo refused to let the bigots win during her headlining performance on Saturday night at BottleRock Napa Valley The first Black woman to headline BottleRock, Lizzo described an unsettling scene as she approached the festival. “I saw signs talking about how they want to cancel people like me. Silence people like me. Choke people like me. And they right across the street,” said Lizzo in a song break during her rendition of “Special.”

The attorney for Paul Pelosi, 82, the husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) who was arrested Saturday night for DUI in Napa, California, after a car crash, issued a statement on the arrest Monday evening. The statement, posted to Twitter by Fox News reporter Chad Pergram, disputes some aspects of reports about events surrounding the arrest but does not address the DUI charge. Statement from Atty for Paul Pelosi: Several news reports about Saturday night’s traffic incident involving Paul Pelosi have included incorrect information. Mr. Pelosi was attending a dinner party at the home of friends near...

Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was driving his Porsche drunk after leaving a Napa Valley Winery Saturday when he pulled out onto a highway into the path of a 48-year-old man driving a Jeep. On Saturday, Paul Pelosi, 82, was arrested for driving while drunk. DailyMail.com said it obtained his arrest report, revealing he was driving eastbound on Walnut Lane, six miles south of the Pelosi’s vineyard in St Helena. According to the report, Pelosi pulled out onto S-29 to cross it, ignoring a stop sign, and was struck by Jesus V. Lopez, who was driving a 2014 Jeep. Lopez was...

When Prohibition finally went into effect on January 16, 1920, those who owned American vineyards for the sole purpose of turning those grapes into wine faced a dilemma: tear up the vines and plant something else, or try and find a way to still make a profit from the grapes with the hope that ban on booze didn’t last very long. This conundrum was especially felt among the vintners of the Napa Valley, who by 1920 were already making a good portion of America’s wine. Here was the problem: if these winemakers tore up their vines in search of other...

Emily Bit remembers a time when she didn’t feel the constant threat of climate change. Her family lives in American Canyon, in southern Napa county, California, a state now being hit by record high temperatures and devastating wildfires. “It didn’t used to be this bad,” she said. These days her family has to evacuate their home every summer. Two of her friends lost their homes in Paradise, the town consumed by the 2018 Camp fire disaster, the deadliest in California history. Last year, a wildfire burned the nature reserve behind her local school until it was “entirely black. It was...

FRESNO, Calif. — Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the closures of certain businesses across 19 counties in California Wednesday, in response to the growing daily number of novel coronavirus cases (COVID-19) in recent weeks. Those counties included Fresno, Kern, Kings, Merced and Tulare in the Central Valley. The closures included restaurants, wineries and tasting rooms, movie theaters, family entertainment centers, zoos and museums, cardrooms, and bars. Gov. Newsom's winery and tasting room in Napa Valley remained open as of the July 1, 2020 order.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg is under fire again for his campaign's fundraising strategy. A top fundraiser to Buttigieg's campaign, Washington consultant H.K. Park, told a potential donor in an email that they should give money to the campaign in order to get on its "radar," appearing to sell access to the candidate. "If you want to get on the campaign's radar now before he is flooded with donations after winning Iowa and New Hampshire, you can use the link below for donations," Park wrote to an unnamed donor. The donor, who spoke with Axios and requested anonymity, characterized Park's offer as...

Here are the photos from inside Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s lavish, closed-door Napa Valley fundraiser that sparked a fierce back-and-forth with Sen. Elizabeth Warren during Thursday’s Democratic debate. The images, tweeted by Recode reporter Teddy Schleifer on Monday, show donors dining with the South Bend, Indiana, mayor in the Hall Rutherford wine caves, beneath a chandelier decked in 1,500 Swarovski crystals. The wine caves also feature an onyx banquet table to reflect the chandelier’s lights and bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon that sell for as much as $900 a pop.

The California winemakers who hosted a dinner at a “wine cave” for Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg are defending the fundraising event. Buttigieg’s political rivals used the recent fundraiser to criticize the South Bend, Indiana, mayor for soliciting campaign contributions from wealthy donors at Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate. Craig and Kathryn Hall, who own the Hall Rutherford winery in Napa Valley, said Friday that they took issue with how their wine cave has been portrayed in the media. “It seems someone’s intentionally trying to create a different image than the reality. And that’s unfortunate,” Craig Hall said. A dispute over...

Members of a book club out for a ride through California wine country say they endured a "humiliating" experience Saturday when they were kicked off the Napa Valley Wine Train, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The women from the Sistahs on the Reading Edge club—10 of them black, one white, per the Napa Valley Register—say they were racially targeted for laughing and talking too loud. "It was humiliating," Lisa Johnson tells the Chronicle. "I'm really offended. ... I felt like it was a racist attack on us." Johnson, who posted photos on Facebook, says members of her group, all seated...

Most people who visit Calistoga -- a town in the Napa Valley -- come for the wine and the spa treatments; few come for the literary history. But they could: one of the most romantic honeymoon getaways ever written about happened one hundred and thirty five years ago. Instead of mud baths and geysers, picture an abandoned mining shack infested with snakes, poison oak, and rusty nails. Now picture a sickly writer and his new wife spending their first two months of married life living there. Sounds crazy, right? But that’s exactly what Robert Louis Stevenson — author of the...

Cork is on the comeback trail in Wine Country. After using synthetic bottle closures for decades, Bay Area winemakers are returning to natural cork, the San Francisco Business Times reports. The possibility of tainted cork has led many producers to use synthetic caps over the years, but the technology for growing and testing cork has improved enough to mitigate the threat and draw companies back, St. Francis Winery & Vineyards CEO Christopher Silva told the publication. If the industry tide shifts back to a natural product, a cheers and a toast to sustainability might just be merited.

In the fog-shrouded forests of California's remote North Coast, winemakers believe they've found the perfect terrain to grow the notoriously fickle pinot noir grape prized by connoisseurs. Vineyard developers are snapping up thousands of acres of redwoods and firs in Sonoma County, with plans to clear the trees and plant the once-obscure varietal made famous by the wine-fueled road trip film "Sideways." Environmentalists and residents in Annapolis, a tiny town about 140 miles north of San Francisco, are trying to rein in the pinot lovers. "If you've seen the movie, you've seen the glassy-eyed stare they have when they talk...

A wind-driven wildfire on Saturday threatened some of California's premier vineyards and the winemaking city of Napa, one of several blazes kindled across the state by dry conditions and seasonal Santa Ana winds. The 400-acre (160-hectare) Napa fire started on Friday morning off a rural highway north of the wine lovers' haven by what fire officials believe was a downed power line. Firefighters had cornered the blaze northwest of the city and were hoping to have it contained by Sunday evening. The Napa Valley, about 40 miles north of San Francisco, is famed for its wine production and beauty and...

One may ask what polar bears have to do with life in the Napa Valley. We learned in late 2006 that the polar bears, those majestic arctic animals of nature films and Coca-Cola commercials, are soon to be added to the endangered species list. Their habitat is being destroyed as global warming continues to reduce the polar ice cap. Will polar bears survive the 21st century? But there is more to consider: Hurricane Katrina, the violent weather now hitting the Pacific Northwest, ski resorts in Europe without snow, parts of our world facing unexpected droughts — all demonstrate that our...

FRONT ROYAL, Va., March 17 /Christian Newswire/ -- Do you drink wine? Millions of people do, but most are unaware of the fact that many winemakers give financial support to Planned Parenthood, the world's leading pro-abortion behemoth. "I like a glass of wine every now and then," said Thomas C. Strobhar, chairman of Life Decisions International. "I am appalled that so many winemakers fund the Culture of Death. I urge my fellow pro-life activists to let winemakers know that they have a 'choice.' They may continue to fund Planned Parenthood and lose a lot of business to competitors or they...

About 100 Napa County-based Barack Obama supporters showed up Monday afternoon on the front steps of the Napa Valley Register building in downtown Napa to protest the newspaper's Sunday endorsement of John McCain for President