Many California growers can’t find buyers as the industry produces more wine grapes than the market wants. Wine consumption is declining globally as people drink less.
It’s harvest time in California wine country, but many growers are struggling to sell their grapes as changing drinking habits have caused demand to plunge. The decline is forcing some growers to tear out vineyards that their families have grown for generations.
Wine sales have decreased by more than 20% over a five-year period, causing prices paid for grapes to drop and prompting California growers to take roughly a quarter of the state’s vineyards out of production. Many growers are having to decide whether to harvest at a loss, leave grapes on the vine or replace vineyards with crops more in demand such as almonds, walnuts, pistachios and olives.
Third-generation grower Bill Berryhill said it means another year of losing money and wasting hundreds of tons of healthy grapes.
Well, the usual "free market"bullshit would dictate that the price drops until it finds enough demand again. But thanks to whatever bull shit system we currently have the price stays the same and they just write off everything that doesn’t sell and they throw it away.
We’re in the MBA Free Market now, where prices never go down ever.
And it’s hilarious because they basically destroy their own market completely by doing that. People’s habits will change if you are gouging them, especially in a recession.
Yep. People aren’t going to go back to their old brands when they find new ones. These people literally are incapable of thinking in long-term strategy and it’s destroying their business outlooks.
shouldnt have depend on your sole source of customer base to ONE client. one of the tng episodes , showed how either party starts to decline both will be affected severely.
Allegiance, Season 3, Episode 18. 🖖
I don’t drink wine but I would eat the grapes.
Wine grapes aren’t typically as palatable as table grapes
They tasted fine to me.
It kind of depends on the grape variety. Some are good, some are just semi sweet leather
Found the alcoholic.
(I kid, I kid)
Aspiring alcoholic. Not there, but I’m trying.
Thanks because most California wine grapes aren’t much different than food grapes… Inferior.
This is so stupid, wine doesn’t go bad. Just make more vintages and sell them when demand returns. Write it off as a long-term investment.
Uprooting decades-old grapevines because of momentary fluctuations in the market is fucking stupid.
Make Rakija, not war.
I prefer mead, Soju, or sake in that ABV range
Soju is incredible.
Aaaaah how sad…
.
Anyway, how about the weather huh?
In California? Probably pretty good… for now.
You’d think this would mean wine would get cheaper or something, but actually it means that several thousands of bushels of grapes are going to rot, because capitalism demands profit over common sense
It can also be distilled into just ethanol.
Probably has some uses. Fuel. Disinfectant. Making those little toys of a bird that drinks water.
Or turn it into a nice balsamico. Better profit margin than ethanol which can be made from way cheaper ingredients.
Exactly!
Balsamic takes 25 years+ to age.
Better get it started then
Should be enough time to fix the international trade relations that Trump is currently “winning”
Making those little toys of a bird that drinks water.
It is decided.
All alcohol saw a large rise in costs. Beer has gotten ridiculous. As far as I am concerned, they did this to themselves.
Yeah; I thought a 20% decrease in sales would lead to a decrease in cost.
When demand goes up, the price goes up.
When demand goes down, the price goes up.
Yeah. The thing about the economy is only the supply side is allowed to win.
You paying the offered price is fair market price setting.
You getting a good deal is THEFT from the hard working business owners.
The really fun thing about the capitalist economy is that only the corporate retail side is allowed to win. The growers are going to get the least, the people who put the label on get the most and the stores get whatever they want.
im still not buying any
businesses: shockedPikachuFace.jpg
I used to be able to buy 4L of cask wine for like $3AUD back in the 00s. Bring back the good times (and my youth)!
Wine is a luxury good, it could damage brand perceptions if they significantly markdown prices. They should bottle and sell it under a different label imo but who knows
It’s America wine. Famous for the Californian “Two Buck Chuck”. On the other hand, the Europeans I know complain that wine in the US is overpriced and most of the domestic market is too sweet.
I saw a lot of really good wine on steep discount recently at Fred Meyer in wa state.
I was very suspicious, bought a bottle, and it was legit.
Maybe people are moving wine at lower price points into markets that don’t normally overlap to move product while minimizing brand damage?
What is this? Civilization? JK
Something tells me that younger generations simply don’t give a shit, it maybe have been a luxury for older generations.
I’ll be honest in high school or college we all would buy the cheapest shit. (millennial). As in the two gallon jugs on the bottom of the shelf. Oh boy the hangovers were intense. And maybe I can’t really tell much of a difference, but I remember I had a seven course paired with wine. All I could think was, yep tastes like wine and sloshed it down and ate the food.
It’s still luxurious, but younger generations don’t give a shit about it. People are drinking less in general and everything’s overpriced. Like why shell out for wine specifically when there’s so much other alcohol choices that are also cheaper now?
Alcohol, to me, feels like a rare treat kind of choice now for anything pricey, instead of a ‘treat yourself it’s the weekend’ choice.
Cheap wine was my gateway to nicer wines down the line. But I rarely drink or have an excuse to open wines, so I’m no longer the target market for all these nice wines.
I agree on that; one of my favorite beers went from ~$20 for a 4 pack to $40. I couldn’t believe it. I tried fancy wines because of just being in certain places but never really got into it. Same with hard liquor, I like a fancy brand but eventually they all started to taste indifferent. It’s like one time I had a $60 glass of some fancy whiskey, I had no idea of the price but work paid for it, and I was like that’s not bad until I saw the bill.
Fuck yeah, bagged wine was a staple of my teens and twenties, that cheap box shit was like party mana, and nothing felt sleezier than sucking on that bag to get every last drop. I do not miss the wine hangover though, good fucking God I’d rather gargle HFA
It was a like rising from the dead the next morning and of course the whole day is wasted.
Yeah they could trick the consumer in selling under a decoy name like… wait a minute
That’s fundamentally missing the problem- sales of wine are down 1/5. They have a supply chain that isn’t moving. If you offer cheaper wine you likely won’t move enough more to make up the shortfall and the costs of production/storage ect.
Mad Dog 20/26
Wine is like $2-5 a bottle in Europe and they also sell more of it there lol
I thought I hated wine because I only had “good” California wine. After trying wine from other parts of the world it turns out California is just really good at making incredibly concentrated grape juice and aging the fuck out of it in barrels until it tastes like raisin caramel leather. Give me cheap S American wine any day.
You definitely have not had good CA wine.
Not shocked at all to see a snobby reply on a post about wine
Odd, California wine is considered as good as or better than a lot of international options now. A lot was learned in the past 20-ish years.
Want some bad wine? Try New Hampshire.
My wife’s aunt and uncle gave us a couple of bottles of Idaho wine. That’s the first and only time I ever threw wine out. It tasted like white supremacy and economic collapse.
A lot of the regions in California have become stupid expensive, like Napa and Sonoma. Anything decent out of Napa is in the $30-$50 range. The average bottle price is somewhere around $75.
And the entry-level stuff from Europe is better than the entry-level stuff from California. If I had to choose between a $15 Cabernet from California and a $15 Bordeaux, I’m choosing the Bordeaux. You’ll also get a better price/quality ratio out of South America. Chile and Argentina make some good wines.
I really like wine and for the life of me I can’t find a single California wine that is worth the price point when compared to Europe. Not to mention there’s so much overmarketed slop wine that does every dirty trick in the book to make it taste disgustingly sweet or over-oaked. I very rarely have had a bad European wine for $50 and I can say that about half of the California wines in that range were worse than 25$ European counterparts. Maybe some of the $500+ bottles really are great in comparison to some of the Grand Crus out of Burgundy, but I haven’t found anything in a reasonable price range that was worth it. And like you said, other regions in the world punch enormously above their price range that I basically don’t buy anything from the Napa area of California as a matter of course. There are a few less popular regions in Cali that make great wine, but they are still too expensive for what they are.
Seems like a good time to start making a fuck tun (~million butt loads) of brandy and dump excess inventory into that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_(unit)
1 Million Wine Butts = 126,000,000 US gallons / 105,000,000 Imperial gallons
Extra fun math problem. 1 liter of Brandy often requires 2 to 3 liters of wine. How much wine is needed to make 1 fuck tun of brandy?
Given 1 fuck tun ≈ 1,000,000 wine butts.
1,000,000 wine butts = 126,000,000 US gallons = about 477,000,000 liters of brandy.
If 1 liter of brandy requires 2-3 liters of wine, then:
477,000,000 × 2 = 954,000,000 liters of wine 477,000,000 × 3 = 1,431,000,000 liters of wine
So, to make 1 fuck tun of brandy, you need roughly 954 million to 1.43 billion liters of wine.
That is about 382-572 Olympic swimming pools of wine. Or, more scientifically, about one fucking billion liters of wine.
2 to 3 fuck tuns[sic]
Canada’s also not buying as much California wine due to Trump’s trade war and general insulting manner.
My wife is doing her part to keep that demand up.
You are allowed to grow cannabis and hemp instead. it grows right out of the dirt! It’s crazy
Also, please be advised that you can grow a large variety of fruits and vegetables instead. CHECK IT OUT
Third-generation grower Bill Berryhill said it means another year of losing money and wasting hundreds of tons of healthy grapes.
Learn to code, Bill.
… oh wait
I actually don’t think weed would grow well there. Wine grapes are usually grown in hotter drier regions. Weeds better grown more on the far northern parts of California in Humboldt where it’s more of a PNW climate.
Wine grapes are usually grown in hotter drier regions.
Allow me to introduce you to the world’s leading cannabis exporter, Morocco
Hey…I’m doing the best I can…I’m only one guy…
