Around the city of Paso Robles, the hills are alive with the growing of wine grapes.
Varieties such as cabernet sauvignon, merlot, petit sirah and zinfandel have thrived here — where a long growing season and unique, diverse soils provide excellent grounds for the Central Coast’s booming wine region.
When vintners first began to put down roots in the area, they were welcomed by what was once considered arguably one of the best areas in California for water, serviced by the Paso Robles subarea groundwater basin.
And for many years, the aquifer deep underground kept giving more water, even as droughts plagued the region. The seemingly never-ending water source fed a burgeoning wine industry that grew from just a few hundred acres in the 1970s to more than 40,000 acres in the Paso Robles region.
But the good times couldn’t last forever, and the basin soon began to show its limits.
In recent decades, residents that rely on the aquifer for their drinking water have repeatedly reported dry wells, leaving them with no source of water for their homes until they can save enough money to drill deeper or they abandon the well entirely and have water trucked in.
Even wineries and vineyards — which had typically invested upfront in much deeper wells than residents — have started seeing their wells dry up.
Since 2014, roughly 178 Paso Robles residents’ wells have gone dry, according to state data. But the crisis is almost surely worse than the data shows because an unknown number of dry wells in recent years have not been reported to the state.
New data and reports now show that the Paso Robles groundwater basin is being severely depleted — with unsustainable amounts pumped throughout the entire last decade. As a result, it is now considered a critically overdrafted groundwater basin in need of management to ensure the long-term sustainability of the water source.
Blame for the status of the groundwater basin is tossed around between lack of regulation from local politicians and overpumping from vintners.
“Let me just say, we’re being overpumped. There’s no way around that, and it’s not residential folks,” said Debbie Arnold, a rancher and the San Luis Obispo County supervisor for District 5. “Paso’s got a portfolio of water to sustain themselves, Atascadero, the same … it’s large ag that has come in. They’re overpumping.”
But vintners and local industry leaders interviewed by The Tribune said placing the blame on the wine industry is oversimplifying a complicated issue.
“Unfortunately, I think in the past it has been simplified into a ‘big versus small’ issue,” said Joel Peterson, president of the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance. “It really shouldn’t be an ‘us versus them’ issue. We’re all users of water — whether you’re washing your clothes and doing dishes and making dinner, or whether you’re running a small family winery. You’re all using water.”
And many vintners fear that measures such as putting meters on every well and restricting the amount of groundwater pumped would be a catastrophic means to an end.
“There are lots of other things that we could do to solve the problem,” said Hilary Graves, a wine grape grower, local water district leader and president of the board of directors at the San Luis Obispo County Farm Bureau. “If we just rely on the reduction of groundwater pumping — which I do agree needs to happen — but if that’s the only solution, our economy will crumble because agriculture drives the economy in this county. It’s No. 1.”
Paso Robles groundwater levels continue to plummet
The most recent annual report analyzing the state of the Paso Robles groundwater basin shows that in 2021, about 82,100 acre-feet of water was extracted from the basin. One acre-foot of water is enough to cover football field in a foot of water.
Approximately 92% of that, or 75,500 acre-feet, was pumped from the basin by agricultural users — nearly all of which are wine grape vineyards. The rest was extracted by the city of Paso Robles, rural homeowners and recreational operations like golf courses or public parks.
It’s estimated that only 62,100 acre-feet of water can be extracted from the Paso Robles groundwater basin each year if the resource is to be conserved for future generations. That sustainable yield has been exceeded every year since 2011, however, according to historical data included in the most recent annual report for the basin.
Such overuse of the water has led to the basin’s groundwater levels dropping by about 700,000 acre-feet since 1998, 122,300 acre-feet of which were came in just the past two years. Overall, that’s more than 228 billion gallons of water used and not replenished since 1998, according to the data.
The most recent major decline in groundwater storage coincided with a dry season in 2020 and 2021, a trend that is consistent with past years of below-average rainfall, according to the report.
Region is receiving less rainfall annually, adding to groundwater woes
Matt Merrill, a grape-grower and general manager of Mesa Vineyard Management, said rainfall levels matter when it comes to determining how much water Paso Robles basin farmers will need to irrigate their crops.
Oftentimes, vintners like to see their grapes get 24 inches of water a year, Merrill said, so if 20 inches comes from precipitation and four inches from irrigation, the water table will be less impacted.
But that would be a good rain year. On average, Paso Robles receives about 12 to 14 inches of rain, meaning more pumping from the basin. And then there are the drought years.
“You get these years where you only have five inches of precipitation, then the rest of it comes from the well water,” Merrill said. “And that’s where things deteriorate more quickly.”
During the 2020 rainy season (July 2019 through June 2020), the Paso Robles area received 6.8 inches of rain, or just 53% of its normal rainfall, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This rainy season, the area had seen about 8.5 inches of rainfall as of the end of March — which is about 75% of the season’s normal rainfall by that time of year, according to NOAA.
The time of year when it rains also matters. Heavier rains in March, April and May mean vineyards can irrigate less because the soil is moist enough to get the vines growing, Merrill said.
But that’s when the climate is ideal. As the climate changes, the Paso Robles region is, on average, receiving less rainfall each year, according to 50 years of rainfall data from the California Department of Water Resources.
Great wine can come from using less water
Many vintners see this and are looking to innovate how they grow their grapes to still produce great-tasting wine.
“We’re trying to prove we can use less water and make really good wine,” said Jerry Lohr of J. Lohr Vineyards & Wines. “We’ve been able to do it, and I think we’ve been quite successful at it.”
J. Lohr sells about 1.75 million cases, or about 20 million bottles, each year. Recently, Lohr has worked to reduce the amount of water used on his vineyards by about 25% to 30%, or roughly 3,750 acre-feet per year, he said.
He’s done this by using the grape skins and seeds as compost for the vineyards — which in turn feeds the soil nutrients and creates a moisture-trapping layer at the ground’s surface. He also uses efficient drip irrigation systems, which are specially timed after years of research to water only when the grapes are really thirsty.
And Lohr’s winery just north of the Paso Robles airport has its own wastewater treatment on-site to convert up to 40,000 gallons of dirty water used in the winery each day to clean water that can be used for irrigation.
Why?
“It’s simple logic: Using less water makes for better wine,” Lohr said, echoing a statement that has only recently become a rallying cry for vintners in the Paso Robles region looking for reasons to reduce groundwater pumping.
“By challenging and stressing the vine, you make a more complex and higher quality wine,” said Peterson of the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance.
Wine industry frustrated at lack of action from government on basin sustainability
But aside from the prospect of producing great wine from using less water, there’s little real incentive for growers to reduce their groundwater pumping.
Graves, the grape grower who’s also vice president of the Estrella-El Pomar-Creston water district, said there are so many solutions out there to help the state of the basin.
“It’s going to take a lot of proactive thinking and a proactive approach by using multiple tools such as improving storage infrastructure, supplemental water, recycled water,” she said. “Also, water conservation incentives, stormwater capture, desalination. Those are just to name a few of the ways that we could solve the overdraft. Doing nothing is not a good solution.”
Graves pointed out that none of those ideas have been used yet, and she expressed frustration over an apparent lack of action from the county’s leadership.
“There’s a lot of ways that they could step up and make it so that we don’t have a single source of water,” she said. “So, yeah, I think it’s just a sign of lack of leadership.”
State law gives teeth to groundwater sustainability efforts
County officials, however, counter that they’ve only recently had the legal mechanism to actually create a sustainable path forward for the groundwater basin.
To urge local governments and water districts to practice good groundwater governance, the state of California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in 2014, which required local governments to find new ways to preserve and protect their groundwater basins and bring them to sustainable levels by 2040.
Before SGMA was enacted, managing groundwater pumping was essentially uncharted territory, said Courtney Howard, the water resources division manager for San Luis Obispo County.
“Prior to 2015, it was just kind of a free market,” she said. “You could put the water underneath the land to ‘reasonable and beneficial use,’ and depending on who you are, you’re gonna have a different opinion on what ‘reasonable and beneficial use’ is. … But I think the state finally recognized that you do need some structure and enforcement when it comes to shared resources like groundwater.”
Soon after SGMA was enacted, the Paso Robles groundwater basin was declared critically overdrafted, and therefore the county alongside the city of Paso Robles, San Miguel Community Services District and the Shandon-San Juan Water District joined to make up the groundwater sustainability agency tasked with managing the groundwater basin.
In 2020, they drafted a groundwater sustainability plan intended to articulate a path forward to restore the basin and submitted it to the state, which has yet to approve it.
As a part of that plan, the groundwater sustainability agencies are working to fund recycled water plants in Paso Robles and San Miguel that would possibly offset those municipalities’ groundwater use. The recycled water could potentially be blended with fresh water and used for irrigation, according to the county’s groundwater sustainability director, Blaine Reely.
And San Luis Obispo County is working with Monterey County to revise the allocation agreement for Lake Nacimiento and potentially allow more water from there to be used for irrigation needs in the Paso Robles basin, Reely said.
The groundwater sustainability plan also lays out a path for the agencies to enforce required pumping reductions in certain areas of the basin where water levels have dropped significantly more than in other areas.
Such pumping reduction could result in the groundwater tables rising significantly, but also “$49.5 million to $146.3 million in lost economic value and in terms of employment, losing between 459 and 1,289 jobs, depending on the water reduction,” according to an economic impact report published in 2020 by Cal Poly.
Vintners in the Paso Robles area say they are wary of the county’s plans, especially if the county relies on a pumping reduction ordinance to solve the basin’s overdraft problem.
Instead, Graves said many farmers want to learn how to grow their crops in a way that will benefit the people, planet and economy all in one. She noted that farmers feel left to their own devices to find a way to reduce their demand for groundwater.
“I think that it’s really easy to paint farmers as kind of the bad guys in the situation because we don’t have an alternative water source,” she said. “But I really am confident in saying that every farmer that I know is trying really, really hard to do a great job of conserving water.”
This story was originally published April 22, 2022 5:00 AM.
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