After a years-long effort to bring the popular House Family Vineyards’ operations up to code following years of non-compliance, the Saratoga vineyard plans to wrap up its work by next spring.
The hillside vineyard has been working toward code compliance since the city found out in 2016 about an unpermitted open-air tasting deck it built in 2013, and told the business it needed a master plan and the appropriate permits to maintain its operations. Since 2022 it’s been holding scaled-back wine tasting operations with temporary approval from the city at Izumi Point, a Zen garden on the property, as it continues work on getting permits for the tasting deck, an underground wine cave and a fire access road.
The city council voted to renew the vineyards’ temporary permits for a second time last month, but neighbors say they’re still worried about the safety of its operations given the increased fire risk in the hillsides.
Jim Cargill, the vineyards’ winemaker, said he didn’t want to extend the city’s temporary approval – also called a temporary compliance plan – any more than its opponents.
“I don’t want this temporary permit one minute longer than I have to have it,” Cargill said. “I guarantee you, as soon as we get occupancy and our other permits and we can get [those] permits done, and I want that gone, and I want to be in my other location. Probably nobody’s more motivated than I am.”
The vineyard earlier this year approached the city about an extension to the temporary compliance plan since it was set to expire at the end of September. The extension that the council eventually approved last month left the temporary permit in effect for as late as spring of 2027, but Cargill said that was more than what the vineyard needed.
“I mean, if it was up to me, I would say I want a one-month extension to get this done and push for that, because nobody works at my speed,” he said.
Cargill said with the impending approval of the environmental impact report for the vineyards’ Old Oak Way operations, approval from the planning commission and final approval from the city council, he’s hoping for the process to wrap up by April 2025.
As part of its scaled-back operations at Izumi Point, the vineyard also kept portable toilets and a handwashing station on site for visitors to use. But the county’s department of environmental health this summer declined to renew their permit to do so.
“Proposed projects are not permitted to use portable toilets and conduct a public business while they are in the process to legalize the business,” city staff said in a report.
In response, the vineyard plans to use a temporary toilet connected to a new sewer lateral that would be served by the Cupertino Sanitary District’s wastewater treatment system.
But residents said they’re worried about the potential health impacts it could have. Resident Geetha Krishnamurthy said the hundreds of proponents of the vineyard who wrote to the city council in support of the temporary extension earlier this month are not residents of the hillsides, and as such aren’t taking their safety concerns into account.
“They just come, enjoy it for an hour or two and they leave,” she said. “But I live in the neighborhood. If there are problems with sanitation, if there is sewage water being leached into the ground, it affects the health of everybody. It affects the neighborhood.”
“I’m becoming resigned to the fact that it is rigged in favor of the politically connected,” resident Curt Bianchi said in a letter to the city council, referring to the process of extending the temporary permits. “If you approve yet another extension of HFV’s TCP, you might as well do away with the temporary compliance policy entirely because there is nothing temporary about it.”
Hillsides resident Mohini Balakrishnan said getting fire insurance for homes in the hillsides is already difficult in an area that’s also been designated a “very high fire zone.”
“Every time there’s one individual who’s doing something that’s going to put us at [risk], we’re leaving ourselves wide open,” she said.
Cargill said he hopes the emergency vehicle access road the winery has been tasked with constructing as part of the permitting process will help address safety concerns.
“We live our lives in fear that there could be a house fire any given day,” Cargill said. “It’s a pretty rare occurrence, and we have a very good fire department that does a very good job.”