Summit Lake and Smith-Madrone seek to keep doing what they’ve already been doing for decades — hosting visitors, holding events, and pouring wine — while their lawsuit against Napa County moves forward
October 1, 2026 (Napa, CA) — Two Napa Valley wineries filed three emergency motions on September 30 asking a federal court to stop Napa County from enforcing new restrictions on longstanding winery operations while their broader lawsuit against the County continues.
The motions ask the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to let Summit Lake Vineyards & Winery and Smith-Madrone keep doing business the way they always have — without a multimillion-dollar road bill, without new barriers to hosting visitors and events, and without threats of fines for pouring wine tastings by appointment, as both wineries have done for decades.
A hearing is scheduled for November 20, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. before Judge Charles R. Breyer in San Francisco.
“Our clients aren’t asking the Court to break new ground — they’re asking Napa County to honor what it has already acknowledged, in writing and under oath, for years,” said Joseph Infante, counsel for the wineries.
Motion #1: A Multimillion-Dollar Bill for Someone Else’s Traffic
Summit Lake argues it’s being forced to pay for a problem it didn’t cause.
Napa County wants Summit Lake to spend more than $2 million rebuilding a shared private road to commercial standards. But according to Summit Lake, the County’s own stated reason for requiring the fix isn’t Summit Lake’s traffic at all — it’s the combined effect of traffic from more than a dozen other properties that also use the same road. Summit Lake says its own day-to-day operations wouldn’t add a single additional car.
In other words, Summit Lake argues, Napa County wants one small winery to pay to fix a road problem the County itself says is caused by everyone else. The motion argues this is not just unfair, but unconstitutional.
Motion #2: Hosting Visitors and Events
Summit Lake and Smith-Madrone also challenge how Napa County decides which winery gatherings are allowed.
The wineries say County rules already let them host certain kinds of gatherings — things like harvest celebrations, winemaker dinners, and food-and-wine pairings — as a normal part of running a winery. But, they argue, the County has been requiring the same burdensome approval process for these casual, everyday gatherings that it uses for large commercial business events.
The motion also challenges how the County decides whether a bigger business event gets approved at all, arguing the process lets county officials pick and choose based on what the event is about and who’s attending — the kind of decision the Constitution doesn’t let the government make.
Motion #3: Private Wine Tastings
Summit Lake and Smith-Madrone are also asking the Court to let them keep offering private, by-appointment wine tastings — a practice at the heart of how small wineries do business.
For Smith-Madrone, the motion argues that Napa County repeatedly told two federal courts — and admitted in sworn discovery responses — that the winery’s 1973 permit allows private, by-appointment tastings with no cap on the number of visitors. The County has since reversed itself, telling the winery it doesn’t actually know what the permit does and doesn’t allow.
For Summit Lake, the motion argues that its 1984 permit only bars tastings open to the general public — not private, scheduled appointments, which Summit Lake has offered for decades. The winery also challenges the County’s position that a decades-old estimate of “2” visitors per week, written on its original 1984 application, is now a hard cap it must never exceed — even though the application never used the word “maximum” or “limit.”
Even County Officials Say the Rules Are Too Vague to Follow
The wineries argue that much of this fight traces back to a basic problem: Napa County can’t say what many of its own winery rules actually mean.
According to the motions, County officials have admitted — in sworn court filings — that they have no definition for the terms at the center of these disputes, including “public tasting,” “private tasting,” “winetasting,” “advertising,” and “unsolicited.” Asked directly what these words mean, the County’s answer has been that it relies only on their “ordinary and commonly understood meaning” — not any written rule, regulation, or guidance.
Court records show Napa’s own planning staff warned the Board of Supervisors as far back as 2009 that the County’s winery rules could be “reversed or re-interpreted” at any time and risked being “considered arbitrary.” A 2015 memo to the Board described the same rules as “imprecise” and lacking “meaningful guidance.” And in 2025, Napa County’s own Civil Grand Jury — after a seven-month investigation — found that winery owners “have expressed confusion” about what counts as a tasting or event under their own permits, that permit conditions “vary almost on a winery-by-winery basis.”
The wineries argue that rules this unclear can’t fairly be used to threaten a business with fines or shutdowns.
Preserving Decades of Business as Usual
Together, the three motions ask the court to keep things as they are while the larger case plays out. The wineries argue that Napa County’s recent enforcement push threatens operations that have gone on for decades, based on rules that are either unfairly applied or too vague for anyone to follow with confidence.
The underlying lawsuit, Hoopes Vineyard LLC et al. v. County of Napa, Case No. 3:24-cv-06256-CRB, challenges several aspects of how Napa County regulates wineries.
Plaintiffs are represented by the law firm Miller Canfield which has successfully litigated similar lawsuits across the country. More: https://www.millercanfield.
https://www.hoopesvineyard.com
https://www.smithmadrone.com
https://www.summitlakevineyards.com
https://thomsonvineyards.com
https://okellhillvineyard.com/
