How BottleRock put Napa Valley on the music

This year’s marquee performers join the star-filled roster of acts BottleRock has hosted over the years, including Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Imagine Dragons, No Doubt, Stevie Wonder, Florence + the Machine, Snoop Dogg, Halsey and Bruno Mars, among hundreds of others. 

“Robert Mondavi put Napa on the map for wine, Thomas Keller put Napa on the map for food, and BottleRock put Napa on the map for music,” said John Truchard, a longtime Napa resident and owner of JaM Cellars and Napa Valley Opera House.

In fact, last year Truchard took over the Uptown Theatre, a historic 860-capacity venue in the heart of downtown Napa, encouraged by the success of the festival to bring national touring acts to this quiet stretch of the city. 

“Before, if a band was touring through California, they wouldn’t even consider coming to Napa,” he said. “Now we’re getting calls all the time asking if the theater is available. That’s in no small part due to BottleRock.”

The festival has also played a role in expanding the demographics of visitors to the region, locals say. 

In the past decade, BottleRock has become one of the biggest music festivals on the West Coast — alongside San Francisco’s Outside Lands and Southern California’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival — with some 120,000 people expected to attend over this Memorial Day weekend.

In 2012, 65.4% of Napa visitors identified as Caucasian and 2.2% as LGBTQ, according to Destination Analysts, a San Francisco-based company specializing in tourism market research and intelligence. Of those surveyed, more than a third of visitors were older than 55. By 2018, the year with the most recent data before the COVID-19 pandemic put tourism on pause, the makeup of visitors shifted substantially, with 25.7% identifying as Asian or Pacific Islander, 9.8% as Latino or Hispanic and 4.1% as Black or African American. The proportion of LGBTQ visitors also nearly doubled to 4.1%, while the mean age of all visitors dropped to 46.

“​​I believe that BottleRock has helped diversify the kind of people that come to Napa,” said rapper Matthew Osivwemu, who is scheduled to perform on the third day of the festival under his stage name Oke Junior. “When I first moved to Napa in 2007 from Oakland, I was one of the only Black kids attending Napa High School and would rarely see people with the same skin complexion as me around town. These days that isn’t the case. They have Black-owned tasting rooms all throughout downtown Napa now. None of that existed prior to BottleRock.”

Meanwhile, the average daily visitor’s spending budget for arts and entertainment also jumped from $18.85 in 2012 to $69.06 in 2018.

“We definitely saw an influx of new customers at the beginning of the event — a much younger demographic than the Napa Valley as a whole is used to,” said Sara Brooks, general manager of Napa River Inn and Historic Napa Mill, who also noted that “BottleRock guests are approximately 85% return business who come every year.” 

The festival also paved the way for more diverse cultural events, from the rap-heavy Blue Note Jazz Festival returning for its second year in July to the Broadway and Vine concert series featuring Tony and Emmy Award winners performing in various vineyards. 

“I believe other music promoters have recognized (BottleRock’s) success and are also bringing big-name performers to the valley,” Sedgley said.

Even Osivwemu wants to get into the mix. He recently secured a grant to produce another hip-hop festival in Napa later this year.

“BottleRock laid the foundation down,” he said. “They are also the first organization to embrace the hip-hop culture and bring it to Napa. Over the years, BottleRock had artists like Too Short, Snoop Dogg, Outkast and Megan Thee Stallion perform in Napa. That is crazy to me.”

Partners Dave Graham, Justin Dragoo and Jason Scoggins of Latitude 38 Entertainment took over BottleRock in 2014 after a disastrous first year at the Napa Valley Expo, a parched plot of land in the middle of a residential neighborhood near downtown, that saw the original promoters rack up $8.5 million in debt. 

“I had this unforgettable moment that first year as an attendee,” Graham recalled. “I was eating Morimoto ribs, drinking a huge Napa Cab and listening to the Black Keys, and I was thinking, ‘Is this really happening right here in my hometown?’ We were all looking forward to the next one, and it seemed like it wasn’t going to happen.”

The Napa natives didn’t want to see something that brought major touring acts to their hometown go away. They also didn’t want the lingering fallout from the first year’s business mishaps, under the production company BR Festivals, to reflect poorly on a region known for its world-class food and wine. So they stepped in, and over the years Latitude 38 Entertainment meticulously revitalized the brand name, transformed the festival site into more of a lush oasis, and gave the festival a distinct Napa feel by partnering with famed area restaurateurs and winemakers. 

“It’s one thing to sell the experience — it’s another thing to deliver it,” Graham said. “The bar is so high for us. When you go up the valley and you look around at the wineries like Duckhorn or Silverado, that’s the bar. When you walk into Mustards Grill or Bouchon, that’s the bar. To deliver on that expectation, it’s almost an impossibility, but we have to try.”

There were some growing pains along the way. 

When the festival was first introduced, Napa locals packed a meeting with city officials and festival organizers to express their concerns about such a large event coming into the community.

“There’s some frustration here,” said Patty Curtan, one of the residents of the Juarez, Alta Heights and Fairview neighborhoods that surround the Expo, back in 2013. “We’re several hundred families living at ground zero — and we’re paying the price for this. Buses, fumes, trash, traffic, behavior, noise, people — all of that. No one asked us about this; we just have to put up with it.”

Brooks said that those concerns were justified at the time and that it has been “a bit of an adjustment” getting used to hosting a major music festival in the small city. “We’ve never had an event of this magnitude before,” she said. “There will always be some challenges like traffic issues, parking and all the things that come with tens of thousands of people coming into Napa at one time.”