Visit Napa Valley dropped a number into reporters’ inboxes Tuesday morning that reads like a victory lap: 3.8 million visitors in 2025, $2.2 billion spent inside Napa County, $2.8 billion in total economic impact — up 2.9% over the year before.
Consumer prices rose 2.6% in 2025.
Do that subtraction and Napa’s visitor economy didn’t grow last year so much as hold still. Which isn’t a knock on Napa. It’s the good news in this story. Run the same subtraction on Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties and all three went backward.
The state publishes a travel-spending series that covers every California county the same way, year after year — the county-level numbers Visit California puts out. By that count, Napa took in $2.09 billion in direct travel spending in 2025, up 2.7% from 2024. Sonoma County took in $2.40 billion, up 1.3%. Mendocino County brought in $532 million, up 0.8%. Lake County brought in $201.1 million, up 0.2%.
Only Napa cleared inflation, and only just. After inflation, Sonoma’s travel economy shrank about 1.3% last year. Mendocino’s shrank nearly 2%. Lake County’s shrank close to 2.5%.
Sonoma County moves more travel money than Napa does — $319 million more in 2025 — and has in every year of the state’s series going back to 2015. Sonoma also finished behind Napa on all three of the brand measures Napa’s new study reports.
That study was fielded late in 2025 by SMARInsights, which surveyed more than 4,000 past and prospective visitors: adults 25 and older, household incomes above $100,000, all of them interested in food and wine travel. It scored Napa against a competitive set of Sonoma County, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Paso Robles and the Willamette Valley. Napa finished first on all three headline measures — 43% said they were likely to visit, 88% were at least somewhat familiar with the place, and 55% rated the experience “excellent,” the only destination in the group above half.
Linsey Gallagher, president and CEO of Visit Napa Valley, said in the release: “Napa Valley isn’t just leading its competitive set — it’s the only destination in that set where more than half of consumers call the experience excellent, which is a testament to the tourism workforce. Our job is to continue to convert that admiration into visits, and to make sure every guest who comes overnight stays longer, spends more supporting our local businesses, and returns to our beautiful valley.”
Three studies, two yardsticks
Lining any of this up against Napa’s last visitor study is harder than it looks.
The 2023 study, released in August 2024, counted 3.7 million visitors, $2.5 billion in spending and about 16,000 tourism jobs — a fifth of the county workforce. The 2018 study before it counted 3.85 million visitors and $2.23 billion in spending. Both came out of the same shop: Destination Analysts, which rebranded as Future Partners in 2023. Tuesday’s numbers come from somebody else entirely — SMARInsights and Tourism Economics.
The break in the figures lands exactly where the vendor changed. Spending drops from $2.5 billion to $2.2 billion while tax revenue climbs from $107.5 million to $294 million. Tourism employment slips from 16,000 jobs to 15,300, and the share of the county workforce goes from one in five to one in seven. That isn’t seven years of economic history. Two of those studies were measured with one ruler and the third with another.
None of this makes the new figures wrong — it makes them incomparable, and it’s the argument for leaning on the state series, which at least measures the same thing every year in every county.
On those state numbers Napa’s 2025 travel spending ran 12.4% above 2019 — a real recovery, and a better one than Sonoma’s 7.5%. Visitor headcount is the softer spot. Napa reports 3.8 million people last year; Destination Analysts counted 3.85 million in 2018. Different counters, but seven years on, the valley is drawing about the same crowd.
One claim in the release does hold up exactly as written. Visit Napa Valley says that without visitor-generated taxes, each Napa County household would pay roughly $5,900 more a year for the same public services. The county has 49,663 households, according to census estimates. Divide $294 million in state and local tax revenue among them and you get $5,919.
The number Napa isn’t leading with
The most interesting finding in the release isn’t in the headline.
Likelihood to visit tracks almost exactly with how much someone likes wine: 71% among self-described wine enthusiasts, 24% among people who don’t drink. That spread is where the business model is exposed, and Visit Napa Valley knows it — the release cites “generational wine consumption trends” as a long-term variable it’s watching. The organization’s answer is to sell the valley as “wine and”: dining, hiking, spas, music, trips with the grandparents.
Out in the tasting rooms, the wine half is having a hard year. The Napa Valley Register reported in June that visits across 363 tracked wineries fell about 2.1% year over year between December 2024 and March 2026, and that Napa wine club membership dropped 4% in 2025 — a net loss of 86 members per winery. The Register drew those figures from Silicon Valley Bank’s direct-to-consumer report and booking data from Commerce7. A standard Napa tasting now runs a median $79, against $39 nationally. Sonoma’s tasting rooms had it worse: traffic off 8% last year, the Sonoma Index-Tribune reported in May.
Who pays for the pitch
Visit Napa Valley runs on a 2% Tourism Improvement District assessment that lodging guests pay on their room bills, split 75% to valleywide marketing and 25% to programs in the individual towns.
The growth lever the study lists first is converting day-trippers into overnight guests. Day visitors are 62% of the people who come and 12% of the money, and they don’t pay the assessment. Filling hotel rooms is both the sound economic answer and the one that funds the marketing department. Those can be the same answer.
The release notes that the full readout goes to Visit Napa Valley’s partners and tourism stakeholders, with press invited to inquire for details.
Fair enough. But the finding that matters is already public, and it isn’t really about Napa.
Napa Valley has the strongest brand in its competitive set. That’s what its own research says, and nothing in the state’s numbers argues with it. A standard tasting there costs more than double the national median, it’s the most familiar name in its category, and it’s the only place in that group that more than half of affluent food-and-wine travelers call excellent. In 2025, running on all of that, it broke even.
Everybody else out here is working the same problem with less to work with.