The popular House Family Vineyards has been working for years to get its operations up to code after years of not doing so. The Saratoga farm plans to finish its work by next spring.
The hillside winery has been working to get in line with the rules ever since the city found out in 2016 about an open-air tasting deck it built without a permit. They told the business they needed a master plan and the right permits to keep running.
With temporary permission from the city, it has been having smaller wine tastings at Izumi Point, a Zen garden on the property, since 2022. This is while it works on getting permits for the tasting deck, an underground wine cave, and a fire access road.
Last month, the city council decided to renew the vineyards’ temporary permits a second time. However, neighbours say they are still worried about the safety of the operations because of the higher risk of fire in the hillsides.
The winemaker at the vineyards, Jim Cargill, said he didn’t want to continue the city’s temporary approval (also known as a temporary compliance plan) any more than the people who were against it.
Cargill stated, “I don’t want this temporary permit any longer than I have to have it.” “I promise you, as soon as we get our occupancy and other permits, we’ll be able to get those done. I want that to be over with, and I want to be in my other location.” “I doubt that anyone is more driven than I am.”
The farm asked the city earlier this year if the temporary compliance plan could be extended because it was set to end at the end of September.
The temporary permit would have been good until as late as the spring of 2027 with the extension that the council finally agreed to last month, but Cargill said that was too long for the farm.
He said, “If it were up to me, I would say I need an extra month to finish this and push for it because no one works faster than me.”
Because the planning commission, the city council, and the environmental impact report for the vineyards’ Old Oak Way activities are all about to sign off on them, Cargill hopes that the process will be over by April 2025.
At Izumi Point, the winery cut back on its activities, but it still kept portable toilets and a washbasin for washing hands on hand for public use. But this summer, the county’s department of environmental health said they wouldn’t renew their permission to do that.
A report from city staff said that proposed projects could not use temporary toilets and run a public business while they were in the process of getting the business licensed.
Because of this, the vineyard is going to use a temporary toilet that will be hooked up to a new sewer lateral that will be handled by the wastewater treatment system of the Cupertino Sanitary District.
But people who live there said they are afraid about how it might affect their health. Geetha Krishnamurthy, a resident, said that the hundreds of people who wrote to the city council earlier this month in support of the temporary extension are not from the hillsides and are therefore not taking their safety worries into account.
“They come, have fun for an hour or two, and then leave,” she said. “But I live nearby.” Everyone’s health is affected when there are problems with drainage and sewage water leaks into the ground. It has an effect on the neighbourhood.
In a message to the city council, resident Curt Bianchi said, “I’m coming to terms with the fact that it is set up to favour those with political connections.”
He was talking about the process of extending the temporary permits. “If you agree to yet another extension of HFV’s TCP, you might as well get rid of the temporary compliance policy altogether, since it’s not temporary at all.”
Mohini Balakrishnan, who lives in the hillsides, said it’s already hard to get fire insurance for houses there because the area is in a “very high fire zone.”
She said, “Every time one person does something that puts us at risk, we leave ourselves wide open.”
Cargill said that he hopes the emergency vehicle access road that the winery has to build as part of the permit process will help make things safer.
Cargill said, “We live our lives in fear that there could be a house fire any day.” Because our fire department is so good at what they do, it doesn’t happen very often.
