Calistoga AVA

When the appellation was submitted, two wineries, Calistoga Cellars and Calistoga Estate, fought against the proposal, as under U.S. wine law they would either have to use 85% grapes from the new AVA (neither did at the time) or change their brand names. Several compromises were proposed, and ultimately rejected, before the AVA was approved. During the process, the TTB, the current federal body in charge of AVA designations, paused the process of all AVA proposals due to the need to redefine regulations. Ultimately, the wineries using the Calistoga name were given three years to come in compliance with the appellation rules or discontinue using the name. ==Name History==

The petitioner submitted the following as evidence that the proposed viticultural area described in the petition is locally and nationally known as "Calistoga:" • Samuel Brannan was the leader of a Mormon settlement expedition on the ship Brooklyn landing in Yerba Buena (San Francisco) in 1846. Following the discovery of gold in Coloma, Brannan became California's first millionaire. Fascinated after visiting the hot springs in the upper Napa Valley in 1852, Brannan purchased more than in the northern portion of Rancho Carne Humana in 1857 with the intent to develop a spa reminiscent of the then-fashionable Saratoga Springs in New York. He founded the town of Calistoga, so named in the fall of 1867, by Mr. Brannan, who was reported and quoted as saying that the name came from his slip of the tongue that transformed "Saratoga of California" into "Calistoga of Sarafornia." Brannan also founded the Napa Valley Railroad in 1864 in order to provide tourists with an easier way to reach Calistoga from the San Francisco Bay ferry boats that docked in the lower Napa Valley on the shores of San Pablo Bay at Vallejo. Meanwhile, the vine planting fever struck the Valley and Brannan had already been infected. On his 1860 trip to France he had bought 20,000 cuttings and now set them out in his nursery near Calistoga. He bought a huge tract of land here in 1862 from J. S. Berryessa and the vine planting began. A map of Napa wineries in 1893 shows significant clustering of wineries near Calistoga distinctly separate from the surrounding areas. • An 1881 book, History of Napa and Lake Counties shows three Napa County viticultural districts: Calistoga, St. Helena and Napa. • In his 1973 book The Wines of America, Leon Adams separates Calistoga as a specific viticultural area. • In the 1983 Modern Encyclopedia of Wine, British writer, Hugh Johnson, significantly includes Calistoga in a listing of "unofficially recognized appellations or sub areas". Calistoga is shown with equal status to most of the sub-areas. (10 of the 12 defined sub-areas have now been made AVA's. • The German book Wine by André Dominé, recognizes Calistoga as one of "The Valley's Three Zones". He further elaborates and describes 20 separate sub-AVA's in Napa. In Domine's listing of the most important sub-AVA's in the Napa Valley, Calistoga is listed equally with all the other TTB-approved AVA's. All the other listings on the page herein provided are in fact TTB-approved AVA's. • James Laube, in his 1989 book ''California's Great Cabernets'', describes "a "commune" system within the Napa Valley is utilized to differentiate where grapes are grown within the valley as well as to analyze regional styles of wine. " In this list Calistoga is included on equal status and recognition as the other nine "communes". 9 of the 10 "communes" are now approved AVA's, Calistoga is nationally known and recognized as a viticultural area. • In Wine Atlas of California, the Australian writer James Halliday definitively covers the Calistoga area that the chapter in his book could provide most of the evidential requirements for this entire petition. Halliday's work is referenced in more than one section of this petition. His table of Contents shows Calistoga equal recognition to 7 approved AVA's, and more distinct than the approved mountain AVA's, which are combined. • A brief summary of ''Calistoga's Wine History'' by Calistoga Winery proprietor Jim Summers, which, the petitioner states, "includes a more historical perspective in the long recognition of Calistoga as a viticultural area." ==Terroir==

Geography and Soils The petition included, as evidence of the Calistoga viticultural area's unique growing conditions, a report written by Jonathan Swinchatt, PhD, of EarthVision, Inc. Dr. Swinchatt's report indicated that the proposed Calistoga viticultural area is distinguished from surrounding areas by its geographic and geologic features. Dr. Swinchatt explained:The entirety of the proposed viticultural area is underlain by volcanic bedrock, part of the more widespread Sonoma Volcanics that occur in the Vaca Mountains, in the northern Mayacamas Mountains, bordering the lower slopes of the southern Mayacamas Mountains, and in Sonoma County. All the rock materials in the proposed viticultural area—bedrock and sediments—are part of, or derived from, the Sonoma Volcanics. These rocks comprise lava flows, ash-fall tuffs, welded tuffs, pyroclastic flows, mudflows, and ignimbrites. Their composition is largely andesitic with some rhyolitic rocks admixed. AVAs [American Viticultural Areas] farther to the south—St. Helena, Rutherford, and Oakville, in particular—exhibit significantly greater geologic diversity across their width, being underlain primarily by marine sedimentary rocks on the west side of the valley but by volcanic rocks on the east. In addition, these AVAs contain alluvial fan environments on their edges, and fluvial (river) environments in their more central parts. The proposed Calistoga AVA is topographically more diverse but geologically more uniform than these other AVAs that include valley floor environments. The mineralogy and chemistry of the substrate throughout the proposed viticultural area reflects the common source of the granular materials in the Sonoma Volcanics. In the mountains, vineyards are planted in colluvium-sedimentary particles that have been transformed from the parent bedrock through weathering processes and have accumulated either in place or moved only a short distance. The upland soils are dominantly excessively drained, gravelly loams, very stony loams, and loams, on steep slopes. Most of the breakdown products of weathering have been transported by streams into the valley; much of the finer material has been transported from the area by the Napa River, leaving coarser sediments behind throughout much of the proposed viticultural area. Alluvial fans have formed at the mouths of most of the drainages, particularly along the northeast side of the valley at Dutch Henry Canyon, Simmons Canyon, Jericho Canyon, and north of Tubbs Lane at the headwaters of the Napa River in Kimball Canyon. At all these locations, cobbly and gravelly loams extend well out onto the valley floor, mixed here and there with finer-grained sediments. On the southwest side, small fans occur at the mouths of Diamond Creek, Nash Creek, and Ritchie Creek. These locations are characterized by cobbly and gravelly loams. Coarse sediments characterize the valley floor throughout the extent of the proposed viticultural area, the finer-grained materials having been transported out of the region by the waters of the Napa River. Soils throughout the proposed viticultural area are loams, gravelly loams, cobbly loams, often with boulders, some with admixtures of silt and clay—clay-rich soils are of limited distribution. These sediments are well drained, with admixtures of clay providing water-holding capacity. Further south in the Napa Valley, gravelly loams and loams are characteristic only of the upper reaches of the alluvial fans that line the valley, while the valley center is often covered by much finer, clay-rich, material. == See also ==