The California wine industry is in the doldrums as it faces three challenges at once: consumer spending on wine is declining, inventory is backed up in the sales pipeline and there’s a glut of grapes and bulk wine left over from the 2024 harvest. The last hazard, the oversupply of grapes, poses an immediate threat. Many growers, even in top regions like Napa, are struggling to sell their fruit. Experts estimate tens of thousands of acres of vines will need to be pulled up to fight the oversupply.
“It's a tough situation. There's no doubt about it, where we sit as an industry,” said Glenn Proctor of Ciatti Company, a global wine and grape broker based in Novato, Calif. “We're kind of going through some resets, trying to understand where we're going to go in the future.”
Christian Klier, North Coast grape broker for Turrentine Brokerage, also based in Novato, agreed. “There will be huge changes in this industry, with more pieces about to fall off the playing board here in the next year or two.”
After the boom, a decline
No company exemplifies the industry’s troubled times more than Vintage Wine Estates, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July. The Sonoma-based firm owned dozens of California wineries, including Clos Pegase, Swanson and B.R. Cohn, all of which were auctioned off to various buyers in September. VWE’s founder built the company by aggressively buying underperforming wineries and wine brands. The goal was to turn them around. But when the ups and downs of COVID-19 hit, coupled with slumping sales and higher interest rates, the company could not continue.
The writing has been on the wall for wine in recent years, although many in the industry paid little heed. Wine consumption in the United States began decreasing in 2021. Last year, sales volume dipped 2.8 percent to 319.2 million 9-liter cases, a more than 9-million-case decline, according to Impact Databank, a sibling publication of Wine Spectator.
“If you go back from the early 1990s until 2018, we were growing overall consumption 2.5 [percent] to 3 percent on average a year,” said Proctor.
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