Last week, Santa Barbara wine businesses joined the newly created Santa Barbara County Wine Business Improvement District.
Fess Parker Winery President Tim Snider says the new district is essential to keeping the county's wine industry growing.
"To promote our region and bring in tourism, which benefits not only the wine business but also auxiliary businesses like hotels, restaurants, etc.," Snider said.
Last week, after years of meetings, 60% of vintners, eight city councils, and the County Board of Supervisors agreed to form the Wine Business Improvement District run by the Santa Barbara County Vintners Association.
"It was absolutely the right thing to do," Snider said.
The Wine BID follows what competing districts from Temecula to Paso Robles have been doing for years.
"It's been frustrating and frankly kind of surprising that we’ve been behind a lot of these other places. Now we got everybody in, you know, all the cities are in, all the communities are in and we can have a really cohesive countywide effort," Snider explained.
Starting this April, 1% of all retail wine sales will go to the Santa Barbara County Wine Business Improvement District to promote tourism.
"It serves as a collective because the vintners are busy — they're making wine, they're selling wine — so the association works on their behalf," said Alison Laslett, Santa Barbara County Vintners Association CEO.
Wineries will then have the choice to either pass the 1% fee onto the consumer or absorb the fee themselves.
"If they are passing it along to the customer, then the consumer will see a 1% assessment for the wine preserve on the receipt," Laslett explained.
Laslett says the fee will generate over $1.5 million annually.
"This will quadruple our budget."
In Temecula, a similar wine BID increased business by 18.7% from September 2022 to September 2023, according to Community Benchmark, a winery direct-to-consumer software company.
Snider says Santa Barbara County wineries are largely family-owned and run, which he says gives our region a unique quality.
"When you have a community based on that, there's just a different kind of spirit and a different approach and a different energy," Snider said.
