Should San Francisco restaurants only serve Napa/Sonoma wines?

Should San Francisco restaurants only serve Napa/Sonoma wines? That the question at the heart of a lively Linkedin discussion thread that consists of (as of this writing) 74 comments. The idea of the talk has its roots in the burgeoning local food movement.  

While I recently indulged in a White Castle burger eat out in Chicago, I regularly shop at the Oakland Farmers Market and wish to help promote the local food movement as I learn more about it. I'm not an expert. But because of my interest, the discussion caught my eye.

Unlike Twitter, which doesn't have a membership gateway and what one tweets is available for public view unless they're set to private, Linkedin groups generally require membership. For that reason I'm not going to post what others have written on Linkedin here. Instead I will give a general overview and provide a link for you to go right to the conversation.

The "Eat Local" movement is a call to encourage residents of a city to consume locally-grown food. The producers consist of food co-ops, community gardens, and farmers' markets. People who steadfastly adhere to this idea call themselves "Locavores" and have a long and growing list of followers.  Moreover, it has production farms, like Alemany Farm in San Francisco:



Currently, the focus has been on promoting foods locally grown in the Bay Area, but Jon Wollenhaupt, the Vice President of Excel Meetings & Events in San Francisco, opened the movement's collective lens to consider wines with his Linkedin question and discussion:

Should the "Eat Local" ethic apply to wine as well? Should San Francisco restaurants only serve Napa/Sonoma wines? The localvore ethic certainly make sense for restaurants that focus on fresh, seasonal ingredients. The eat local movement here in the Bay Area has very passionate, vocal supporters. More often, I am seeing this conversation extended to include wine. To what extent does this make sense, if any? How do wine producers react to this?

Increasing criticism is surfacing in articles of San Francisco restaurants who are not "supportive enough" of local (Napa/ Sonoma) wineries. Some wineries seem to be trying to leverage the localvore position to influence and minimize the purchase and placement of imports on wine lists. Is that position defensible if those same wineries are shipping to out-of state distributors? Or even to Southern California accounts? (a lynchpin of the localvore position is the 100 mile diet)

The conversation has attracted a number of luminaries in the San Francisco Bay Area Wine Industry. Some think including wines is taking things a bit too far. I and others were concerned that local urban wineries were being left out of the conversation.

I write this in an effort to open the conversation to a wider audience. Hopefully, San Francisco Chronicle Food Critic Michael Bauer will take up this subject - the last time he blogged about the local food movement was 2007. I'd love to hear or read his take on this, and by extension that of his readers.