RIPON: McManis Family Vineyards is selling its main winery facility at 18700 East River Road in Ripon and 11 accompanying vineyards across San Joaquin and Sacramento counties, a 3,500-acre offering priced at $22 million in total, The Real Deal reported on September 24, citing the Sacramento Bee.

The cause is trade policy, not farming. About 40 percent of the family-owned winery's export sales, roughly 75,000 cases, went to Canada. Between last July and this July, that business collapsed to about 5 percent of sales, around 1,000 cases, after Canadian provinces banned American alcohol in retaliation for U.S. tariffs.

Photograph: Pauline Eccles, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The 11 individual vineyards are priced from $800,000 to $14 million. About 90 percent of the winery's overall business involves growing and crushing grapes for other vintners, which vice president Dirk Heuvel had said could keep the company afloat without Canadian exports. It was not enough.

The McManis sale is the largest single asset to hit the market as a direct consequence of the Canada boycott, and it will be watched as a pricing event. A 36-year-old going concern with 3,500 acres, priced at $22 million, sets a reference point for every distressed vineyard negotiation in the Central Valley this winter.

The broader toll keeps rising. Inc., citing Associated Press reporting, puts the cost of Canada's boycott to U.S. wineries at $522 million. In June, Gallo announced it would shutter a San Joaquin crush facility and lay off 20 employees. Valley Farm Management CEO Jason Smith has described selling his land and burning vineyards that were no longer worth maintaining.

Photograph: Daniel Spiess, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

For buyers, McManis is the trade's distressed-asset test case: productive acreage, an operating winery, and a motivated seller, in a market where the bid side finally has the leverage.