The size of the shortfall is the trade number in the announcement. A crop that far below average means less fruit for growers to sell and less wine for wineries to make from a county with more than 1,800 grape growers across 19 American Viticultural Areas, in the association's own description of its membership. The association's president and chief executive, Karissa Kruse, said a thin crop is hard on farming families, while also expressing hope that a short crop could help rebalance grape supply and demand across the county.

Photograph: Simon Davison, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A season that started warm, then turned at bloom

The calendar ran early from the start. Warm spring weather came first, followed by a cold, wet and windy stretch during bloom that cut the crop, and then a summer the association called exceptional during the peak growing season. Duff Bevill of Bevill Vineyard Management in Dry Creek Valley traced the same sequence from the vineyard side: warm weather in late February woke the vines, a cool turn during flowering stretched pollination weeks beyond normal, and nearly every vineyard ended with much lower production than normal, with quality he called exceptional.

The first fruit came off on July 16 at Dutton Ranch, which Steve Dutton described as the first pick in Sonoma County and the earliest start the ranch has recorded. The association's July 24 harvest opening release had already flagged the same shape of season: a start that may be the earliest in the region's history, healthy vines, lower crop loads and fruit setting up with concentration and structure. Dutton, farming in the Green Valley and Russian River Valley areas, said the fruit that was picked showed concentration and balance, especially in Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Whites done in August, reds done by October 12 in Alexander Valley

The AVA reports in the October 19 announcement read as a county of early finish lines. In Alexander Valley, Bret Munselle of Munselle Vineyards said his operation started and finished its whites in August for the first time ever, with Chardonnay about 10 to 15 percent below its five year average, Sauvignon Blanc blocks at roughly half of that average, whites overall running four to five weeks earlier than normal, and reds finished by October 12, also a first. Jim Rickards of J. Rickards Vineyards and Winery, marking a 50th year farming in Sonoma County, paired one of the earliest harvests his operation has seen with one of its earliest budbreaks.

Photograph: Jim G, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

On the Sonoma Coast, Steve Sangiacomo of Sangiacomo Family Vineyards pointed to below average yields from the cool bloom period and to small berries as the quality marker of the vintage. At Rodney Strong Vineyards, Justin Seidenfeld called 2026 the earliest harvest of his career and one of the lightest, and said the concentration in the tanks is strong. In the Petaluma Gap, Tony Lombardi of Lombardi Wines credited the area's afternoon winds and marine air with keeping its Chardonnay and Pinot Noir bright, with generous acidity showing again this year. Brian Ball of Sphaerics Wine tied the early start to warm March weather and a smaller crop load, and the moderate summer temperatures to natural acidity and concentrated flavors.

What a light crop does to the grape market

Kruse said the association is hearing "tremendous excitement about the quality of the 2026 vintage" from the vineyard to the cellar, and that wineries are purchasing additional grapes to meet consumer demand. That buying interest matters in a year when many growers came into harvest with unsold fruit as the industry's standing problem. A short county crop does not erase the wider California surplus, but fruit that wineries are actively seeking is a different market from fruit looking for a buyer, and the association is presenting the 2026 shortfall as a step toward balance rather than a loss.

The remaining question is tonnage. The 35 to 40 percent figure in the announcement is an estimate made at the close of picking, before any official crush accounting. Until weighed totals are published, the trade is working from the growers' own early arithmetic: a very early season, a bloom period that cost the county a large share of its crop, and tanks that winemakers across five AVAs say are holding concentrated wine.

Napa County retained the North Bay's lowest unemployment rate at 4.2 percent, the fourth lowest among California's 58 counties, down from 4.3 percent in August. Marin and Sonoma counties tied for sixth at 4.3 percent, with Sonoma improving from 4.5 percent in August. Both measures also rebounded from August across the region: the labor force increased by 5,910, or 0.8 percent, and resident employment rose by 6,960, or 1 percent.

Photograph: Treephoto, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Fewer people in the labor force

The year-over-year declines are the story underneath the rates. Napa's labor force fell 0.9 percent to 74,300, while resident employment fell 0.8 percent to 71,200. Sonoma's labor force fell 1.7 percent to 247,200, and its resident employment declined 1.5 percent to 236,500, though both Sonoma measures increased from August, by 0.6 percent and 0.8 percent respectively.

Eyler, a Sonoma State University economist who has been tracking the trend for months, told the Business Journal he sees little new in the year-over-year dynamics. He said the shrinking workforce could reflect retirements among an aging population, changes in immigration and migration, or revisions to preliminary estimates, and he framed the open question as whether another 5 or 6 percent reduction is coming, or whether the region is in a slow, steady 15-year leveling off.

Farms hired, wineries shed, healthcare carried

Employer payrolls told a different, more favorable story. Napa added 1,000 jobs over the year, up 1.2 percent, including 700 farm jobs, up 12.1 percent, and 400 leisure and hospitality positions. Beverage and tobacco product manufacturing, which includes wineries, declined by 300 jobs, or 2.4 percent. Sonoma added 1,300 jobs, up 0.6 percent, including 500 in leisure and hospitality and 400 in trade, transportation and utilities, while losing 400 manufacturing jobs and 300 in construction.

Photograph: Deb Harkness, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Healthcare did the heavy lifting across the region. Private education and health services accounted for a combined 3,860 additional North Bay jobs over the year, including 1,300 in Sonoma and 200 in Napa. Beacon Economics, in its seasonally adjusted regional analysis reported by the Business Journal, put Napa's year-over-year payroll growth at 1.9 percent, leading the Bay Area, while estimating that Napa lost 200 jobs in September alone on a seasonally adjusted basis, a different measure from the department's unadjusted county estimates.

Statewide, California's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate held at 5.1 percent in September, and employers added 129,300 nonfarm payroll jobs over the year, up 0.7 percent, the department reported. The Governor's office, announcing apprenticeship funding on October 16, cited the same state figures: 129,300 jobs created year over year, with the unemployment rate holding at 5.1 percent, matching its lowest level since February 2024.

For wine country employers, the two trends point in opposite directions at once. Harvest and hospitality payrolls are still growing, but the pool they hire from is getting smaller, and the fastest growing employer in the region is now healthcare. A lower unemployment rate built on a shrinking labor force is not a hiring market getting easier. It is a hiring market getting thinner.

The announcement, carried the same day by EIN Presswire and its syndication partners, calls the deal the first time Sojourn has owned its physical space. It is also the first time the winery's offices and its guest spaces sit in a single consolidated location, the announcement said.

Photograph: Sojourn Cellars, via EIN Presswire

From one table to three buildings

Sojourn first opened at 141 East Napa Street in 2009, in a single room with one table for seated tastings, the announcement said. Its own site gives the same address, and its tasting salon page describes the same model today: seated, comparative tastings of its single-vineyard Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, poured side by side across their growing regions, including the Sonoma Coast, the Russian River Valley and Napa Valley.

"We started here in 2009 with a single table," said Sherrie Perkovich, the winery's head of marketing and consumer experiences, in the announcement. She framed the purchase as a way for the winery to control its own future on the street where it began, while keeping the intimate character its regular guests know.

The middle building, at 143 East Napa Street, has already been reworked around a large custom table seating up to 12 guests, so the winery can host larger private and corporate groups, the announcement said. An outdoor tasting patio widens the options further.

Photograph: Sojourn Cellars, via sojourncellars.com

Renovation next, on the winery's own timetable

Owning the buildings changes what Sojourn can do next. The winery plans a phased renovation built around the property's existing structure, aimed at improving the tasting experience while keeping the rooms cozy, and it plans to offer full property buyouts for large private gatherings, corporate events and exclusive tastings, the announcement said.

The trade significance is the direction of travel. In a season of tasting room closings and distressed sales across wine country, a producer that began as a tenant with one table is spending money to own its corner of downtown Sonoma outright. Rent becomes equity, a landlord's timetable becomes the winery's own, and a salon that could have been lost to a sale is now the one asset Sojourn controls completely.

The food-led sets anchor the range. Holiday Cheer pairs a dozen Estate Brut infused caramels from Anette's Chocolates in Napa Valley with the 2022 Estate Brut Cuvee for $73, the announcement said. Pinot Perfection matches the same chocolatier's salted caramel dark chocolates with the 2023 Estate Pinot Noir for $81, and Dinner for Two adds a ready French meal built around beef bourguignon with the 2023 Estate Pinot Noir for $115.

Photograph: Domaine Carneros, via Send2Press Newswire

Fondue, puzzles and a saber

The Carneros Pantry, at $115, gathers wine country provisions made with the estate's wines, including Sonoma saucisson, Napa Valley mustard and the winery's own Brut Rose caramel popcorn, alongside the 2022 Estate Brut Cuvee, the announcement said. Fondue Rendezvous, at $120, pairs cheese and chocolate fondues and a ceramic pot for two with the 2020 Ultra Brut.

New this year, The Perfect Fit is a 79-piece birchwood jigsaw puzzle of the chateau paired with the Blanc de Noir, at $105. At the top of the range, Sommelier's Dream pairs a handcrafted Italian sommelier saber, engraved with the winery's logo, with the 2018 Le Reve Blanc de Blancs, the winery's tete de cuvee, for $354. Club members pay 20 percent less across the collection, the prices in the announcement show.

For buyers who only want the wine, the winery offers gift boxes for 12 of its estate wine combinations, priced from $61 to $258, the announcement said. Its corporate program, run by a dedicated gift concierge team, builds custom collections for recipient lists of 5 to 500.

Photograph: Sarah Stierch, via Wikimedia Commons

The calendar is the offer

The collection runs on shipping deadlines. For Thanksgiving arrival, gifts must ship by November 17 for out-of-state delivery and November 22 within California. For Christmas, the ground deadlines are December 16 outside California and December 21 in state, and for New Year's Eve, December 20 and December 28, the announcement said. All of the gifts can also be picked up at the winery.

The winery behind the offer is the Carneros sparkling house founded by the family behind Champagne Taittinger. Its own history page dates the founding to 1987, when the Taittinger family selected a 138-acre parcel in the heart of Carneros for the venture. The release puts the estate at six vineyards totaling about 400 acres of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, entirely within the Carneros AVA between Napa and Sonoma counties, and notes the winery marks its 40th anniversary in 2027.

Holiday gifting is where direct-to-consumer economics get honest. A gift set travels to a recipient who may never visit Carneros, at a margin a wholesale case never sees, and the shipping deadlines turn October browsers into November orders. Domaine Carneros is not discounting its way into the season. It is packaging the chateau, literally, puzzle included, and mailing it.

The set goes on sale October 15, exclusively through Silver Oak's own site, while supplies last, the announcement said. Independent coverage of the launch in OffTheMrkt and Restaurant Hospitality News carried the same terms: 100 sets, $450, October 15, sold only through Silver Oak.

Photograph: Sarah Balduzzi, via PR Newswire

Cabernet red, handmade in Los Angeles

Throwing Doubles developed a custom Cabernet-red leather board for the collaboration, finished with an embossed Silver Oak wordmark and handmade in Los Angeles, the announcement said. The board is designed to be played as much as displayed, and to travel: packed for weekends away and pulled out after dinner.

"Wine and backgammon both have these incredible histories, but neither needs to feel overly traditional," said Throwing Doubles founder Brittany Weinke in the announcement. "The best backgammon boards live out on a table."

Silver Oak's chief marketing officer, Lauren Larrabee, framed the set the same way, around the dinners the wine already shows up at. "It's the dinners with friends, family traditions, and nights that people remember years later," Larrabee said in the announcement.

Photograph: Silver Oak and Throwing Doubles, via OffTheMrkt

Selling the occasion, not just the bottle

Throwing Doubles, founded in 2022 by Weinke, reworks classic games in premium Italian leather and sells through retailers including Moda Operandi, FWRD, goop and Nordstrom, according to the announcement. Silver Oak, founded in 1972 and known for Cabernet Sauvignon aged exclusively in American oak, says its wineries in Napa Valley and Alexander Valley were the first production wineries to achieve LEED Platinum certification.

The economics are the story under the gift wrap. A 100-unit run at $450 caps the gross at $45,000 before the wine is even counted as marketing, but the real return for a direct-to-consumer brand is a gift that sits on a coffee table all year, carrying the winery's name into rooms its tasting room never reaches. In a market where wineries are fighting for fewer drinking occasions, Silver Oak is bidding to own one of the occasions outright.

The tasting, created and produced by Cultured Vine and its founder Angela Duerr, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Judgment of Paris and took place on what would have been the 85th birthday of Steven Spurrier, the British wine merchant who organized the original Paris tasting.

Photograph: Aperture Cellars

Twenty wines, 10 whites and 10 reds spanning Burgundy, Bordeaux, California and beyond, were tasted blind and selected by Master of Wine Peter Marks and Master Sommelier Peter Granoff. The judging panel included winemakers Philippe Melka, Michael Silacci, Chris Carpenter, Tor Kenward, Aaron Pott and Angelina Mondavi, alongside critics including Jancis Robinson MW and Jonathan Cristaldi of Decanter. Because Katz and Tor Kenward each ended up with a wine in the competition, their scores were excluded from the final tally.

The red wines, in order of finish

Aperture's Collage took first, followed by the 2022 Chateau Mouton Rothschild of Pauillac in second, the 2023 TOR Beckstoffer To Kalon Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon of Oakville in third, the 2023 Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon of Oakville in fourth, and the 2021 Dominus of Yountville in fifth. The 2022 Chateau Leoville Las Cases, 2022 Chateau Montrose, 2023 Chappellet Pritchard Hill Cabernet Sauvignon, 2022 Vina VIK of Chile and 2023 Tenuta San Guido Sassicaia of Tuscany completed the red lineup.

"I've been saying for years that the best sites in Sonoma County belong in the conversation for the finest Cabernet Sauvignon and Bordeaux-style wines in the world, and this win proves what we have believed all along," said Jesse Katz, Aperture's founder and winemaker, in the announcement. "That it happened blind, alongside benchmark wines from the most famous estates and chateaux in the world's greatest wine regions, makes it incredibly meaningful."

Photograph: Aperture Cellars

The 2021 Collage Proprietary Red, first released in 2025, is the inaugural vintage of the collection Aperture calls its most ambitious and artistically driven project. The blend draws on more than 200 acres across five Sonoma appellations, with more than 300 individual vineyard lots evaluated for each red; the 2021 red spent 24 months in barrel, six months in custom concrete vessels and a further year in bottle before release, debuting at $425 a bottle.

The result carries the echo of the history it was staged to honor. On May 24, 1976, Spurrier and his American business partner Patricia Gastaud-Gallagher organized a blind tasting in Paris pitting California Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon against acclaimed French wines; California wines finished first in both categories, in an outcome that stunned the wine establishment. Fifty years later, the tribute tasting's red category went to a Sonoma County wine, with Gastaud-Gallagher, Spurrier's widow Bella Spurrier, and the family of Time magazine reporter George Taber present at Freemark Abbey.

Aperture, founded in 2009 by first-generation winemaker Katz, works with more than 200 vineyard acres across Sonoma County, including its Healdsburg estate in the Russian River Valley and Farrow Ranch in Alexander Valley, where some estate vines were planted as far back as 1912. The winery says Katz was named Wine Enthusiast's 2025 Winemaker of the Year and that Aperture ranked No. 14 on the 2025 World's 50 Best Vineyards list.

Roddick started at the winery as a tasting-room host in 1997 and has since helped grow Hope Family Wines from 1,000 cases to nearly one million, with distribution in all 50 states and 62 countries. Working alongside owner-winemaker Austin Hope, she has put the brand on the map globally, built national distribution, developed a robust direct-to-consumer sales channel, and guided the company's 130-person team. As executive vice president, she joins Hope in overseeing all company operations, from production and winemaking to finance, hospitality, sales and marketing.

Hope Family Wines · Source

"It means a great deal to be recognized by the editors of Wine Enthusiast," Roddick said. "But this doesn't belong to me alone. When I started in the wine industry 30 years ago, I had no idea how many generous people would take time to teach me, push me and believe in me. My leadership style and drive come from those mentors and colleagues."

Roddick grew up in San Jose, the daughter of entrepreneurial parents, and graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a degree in fruit science and a minor in agricultural business. In 1997 she took a ground-floor job with a small, then-unknown Paso Robles winery, the one that became Hope Family Wines, and learned the business alongside Austin Hope as the company grew around them.

A champion of the industry

Roddick's influence extends well beyond the winery. She joined the Wine Institute's board of directors as a central coast director in 2008 and was elected in June 2026 to serve as the organization's 2026-27 board chair, the institute's top leadership position. In that role she leads the board's work on legislative and regulatory advocacy, international market development, media relations, scientific research and education programs for California's wine industry. Her peers previously recognized her as San Luis Obispo County's Wine Industry Person of the Year in 2022, the same year Hope Family Wines was named Wine Enthusiast's American Winery of the Year.

Paprika Studios / California Grown · Source

"Gretchen is a relentlessly optimistic difference maker at a time when our industry needs it most," said Jacqueline Strum, president and publisher of Wine Enthusiast Media. "Her leadership has been instrumental in the growth and success of Paso Robles and the greater wine industry. Best of all, she lifts others up, brings people together and doesn't see obstacles, only opportunities."

Austin Hope, the company's president and winemaker, called Roddick's leadership style world class. "Gretchen's work ethic, insatiable drive, and passion for success have been a privilege to watch for 30 years," he said. "Her love for life and people is infectious to be around." The company's portfolio spans six brands, Austin Hope, Treana, Quest, Austin, Liberty School and Troublemaker, and its flagship Austin Hope Cabernet Sauvignon has twice been named a Top 10 Wine of the Year by Wine Enthusiast.

"I'm going to take a moment to enjoy this," Roddick said in the announcement. "Paso Robles and California wine have given me so much, and it's a joy to share this recognition with everyone who has made our region what it is today. I can't wait to see where we go next, together."

The announcement lists lots including a private Petaluma River boat tour for 12 people, a Tahoe getaway for four, a rustic Petaluma barn dinner for 20 guests, a cabin aboard the 2027 Petaluma Gap Douro wine cruise with Expedia Cruises and Ama Waterways, plus award-winning wines and wine country travel and hospitality experiences.

Ridge Vineyards

"This is the first time we've created a fundraising auction, and we wanted it to be something truly special," said Heidi Bridenhagen, President of the Petaluma Gap Winegrowers Alliance Board of Directors. "Our members and partners have come together with some extraordinary wines and experiences."

Proceeds will fund the alliance's operations and programs, including education, marketing and outreach designed to build awareness of the Petaluma Gap AVA and the growers and vintners who make wine there.

The Wind to Wine Festival runs from 1 to 4 p.m. at Gambonini Family Ranch, 7325 Old Lakeville Road No. 3 in Petaluma, on the grounds of the ranch's restored historic hay barn from its working dairy days. More than 20 Petaluma Gap wineries will pour, with VIP tickets at $95 for 1 p.m. entry and general admission at $75 for 2 p.m. entry. Guests will also find artisan cheese and charcuterie, paella, and live music.

Visit Petaluma

The wind-driven AVA

The Petaluma Gap was designated an American Viticultural Area on December 7, 2017. It sits at the southern end of Sonoma County and extends into northern Marin County, defined by persistent afternoon winds and cool-climate growing conditions that favor Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Syrah.

The Santa Rosa Signal had previewed the 10:41 scheduled arrival, and the airport's ribbon-cutting on The Flying Ace patio at 9 a.m. came with Snoopy, wine and cupcakes. Delta joins Alaska, American and Southwest at the airport, restoring four commercial airlines at Santa Rosa, and a second flight on the route, Delta 3533, was set to arrive just after 4 p.m.

Sonoma County Tourism

The Salt Lake City route will run twice daily, connecting Sonoma County to one of Delta's busiest hubs. Salt Lake City International is a major hub for Delta, which accounts for about 70 percent of the airport's traffic, and the airport fields more than 300 departures a day to more than 100 destinations after accommodating roughly 28 million passengers last year.

The same day, Delta started its Wine Takes Flight program, which lets active SkyMiles members who are at least 21 check one case of wine at no charge on Delta or Delta Connection flights to destinations within the 50 states. A case means up to 12 unopened 750-milliliter bottles in a single container weighing no more than 50 pounds, within the 62 linear-inch checked-bag limit, and the waiver covers the standard $45 checked bag fee. Five Northern California airports qualify: Sonoma County, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Sacramento.

The program resembles Alaska Airlines' Wine Flies Free, launched in 2007, which lets loyalty members check a case of wine without a bag fee from 34 West Coast airports in California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

Sonoma County Airport

Alaska, the largest commercial carrier serving Santa Rosa, announced plans in May for a nonstop Salt Lake City link starting November 1 but recently dropped them. Alaska is ending its Sonoma County to Ontario service at month's end while adding Boise and Phoenix nonstops on November 1. Southwest, the other airline at the field, began flights to Denver a few days a week in April and plans to increase frequency until going to daily service on March 11, 2027.

Sonoma County Airport

Together, the winery and the member turn each bottle into a $30 gift to the V Foundation for Cancer Research, six times the winery's year-round giving. On the first 2,500 bottles, that math totals $75,000 for the foundation. Bottles sold after the match is met keep generating the doubled $10 donation, the winery said. The Isla Rose Brut Rose sells for $60 a bottle, or $51 for club members.

Courtesy of Bricoleur Vineyards

"When one of our club members came to us and offered to match our giving four-to-one, I was speechless," said Sarah Citron, co-founder and CEO of Bricoleur Vineyards.

A campaign that began with a diagnosis

Sip with Purpose started in 2023, after Citron, then 32, was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer. Through treatment that included chemotherapy, radiation, a double mastectomy and the I-SPY 2 clinical trial, which shrank her tumor by 40 percent, she kept leading the winery and built the campaign around the V Foundation. Today she is cancer-free. The Isla Rose Brut Rose, a Pinot Noir and Chardonnay blend drawn largely from the Carneros region, is named for her daughter.

The campaign has donated more than $102,000 to date to organizations including the V Foundation, the American Cancer Society and Cycle for Survival. The V Foundation, founded in 1993 by ESPN and the late Jim Valvano, says an endowment covers its administrative expenses, so 100 percent of direct donations fund cancer research. The foundation says it recently passed the $500 million mark in grants awarded and has earned 14 consecutive four-star ratings from Charity Navigator.

Courtesy of Bricoleur Vineyards

Bricoleur Vineyards is a family-owned estate winery in Windsor, in Sonoma County's Russian River Valley. It opened its doors in May 2020 and was named one of the best new wineries in the country by USA Today in 2022. This month the estate is also dedicating the $10 entry fee for its 8th Annual Harvest Party on October 11 to cancer research.

Courtesy of Bricoleur Vineyards

The wine blends grapes from vineyards across four Napa Valley appellations: St. Helena, Oak Knoll, Atlas Peak and Rutherford. Each appellation's lots were aged in separate barrels before being combined into the final blend, a structure the company says lets each lot develop on its own. "Our objective was simple, to capture the character of Napa Valley, not just a single vineyard or appellation," said Eric Aafedt, the vice president of winemaking at Bogle Family Vineyards, speaking on behalf of Juggernaut Wines. "This wine doesn't represent just one place, it represents Napa Valley as a whole. Every appellation contributes its own character, and together they create a Cabernet for Juggernaut that's more complete than any one component could have been on its own."

Photograph: Juggernaut Wines

The packaging trades the red lion of the original California Cabernet for a minimalist black and gold design, keeping the brand's alpha-predator imagery while marking the new bottle as a limited-production step up.

A value brand climbs the appellation ladder

Juggernaut was founded in 2018 as part of The Bogle Family Wine Collection, based in Clarksburg, and built its name on wines the brand describes as sourced from extreme growing conditions, from steep hillsides to fog-battered coasts. The Napa Valley release is the brand's premium expression of the varietal it started with: Cabernet Sauvignon was the first wine Juggernaut crafted. According to Impact Databank, cited by Shanken News Daily, the Juggernaut lineup had U.S. volume of 330,000 cases last year.

The $29.99 suggested price puts a Napa Valley appellation Cabernet on national shelves at a number more commonly associated with California-designated wines. The wine is available now at select retailers nationwide.

Photograph: Juggernaut Wines

The imbalance that remains, in his account, is inventory rather than acreage. Wineries and distributors still hold elevated stocks of wine already made, so grape purchasing can stay weak even once the vineyard base fits demand. Ekman's closing question is the measure of the turn: the industry's question, he writes, may soon shift from "How many more vineyards need to be removed?" to "How much vineyard capacity can California afford to lose?"

Photograph: Brocken Inaglory, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Ekman's arithmetic starts from removal. Land IQ, the satellite-mapping firm his analysis leans on, identified 38,134 acres of vineyard removed between October 1, 2024 and August 1, 2025, and Allied Grape Growers estimates roughly another 40,000 acres could come out in 2026. Standing acreage, he projects, falls to between 437,000 and 442,000 acres by the end of 2026. From that base he discounts a further 5 to 8 percent of acreage as idle, mothballed, or abandoned, between 17,000 and 42,000 acres. "This is an analytical assumption, not a reported statistic," the analysis cautions. What survives the discount is his 400,000-to-420,000-acre productive range. The Associated Press reported in September that growers have taken roughly a quarter of the state's vineyards out of production since the pandemic-era peak of almost 600,000 acres.

The benchmark keeps moving

Ekman's range lands close to the industry's own yardstick. Allied Grape Growers, the growers' cooperative, estimates California needs roughly 410,000 to 425,000 productive bearing acres for longer-term balance, figures Ekman's analysis adopts. But the cooperative's president, Jeff Bitter, has since told the San Francisco Chronicle that the balance point has moved below 400,000 acres as demand kept sliding, while allowing that calling the state near balance would not be wrong. His caveat is the inventory overhang: unsold wine from earlier vintages keeps the spot market softer than the acreage math alone suggests, and he expects another significant year of removals.

The brokers strike the same caution from the other side. Glenn Proctor, a partner at the wine and grape brokerage Ciatti, told the Chronicle he sees a high chance growers overshoot the correction and remove too much, discovering it only later, and pointed to the pattern's history: shortage cycles have followed oversupply roughly every six to 10 years since the 1970s, most recently after 2012. Ekman's own broker figures show the buffer that would cushion a shortage: Turrentine Brokerage counted about 28 million gallons of bulk wine offered for sale in August 2026, and estimated only 15 to 17 million of those gallons had a realistic commercial home.

Photograph: Brocken Inaglory, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Why the math matters now

The demand side keeps the argument honest. The AP reported that wine sales have fallen by more than 20 percent over a five-year period, and that about half of this year's wine grape crop entered harvest without contracts with buyers, compared with 70 to 80 percent under contract in a typical year. Ekman's baseline is 200 million cases of domestic demand, down from 240.5 million cases shipped in 2021, and his model turns on it: at 190 million cases the state would still carry 13,000 to 33,000 excess acres, while at 210 million it could already be short of capacity. Bitter told Farm Press in February that growers were on track to remove another 40,000 acres in 2026, after about 37,000 acres in 2024 and 40,000 more following the 2024 harvest.

Ekman, who has led Spring Mountain Vineyard through its post-wildfire revitalization since 2023, has a direct stake in the answer: the estate's future business rests largely on selling grapes, so whether the state's vineyard base has reached equilibrium decides how he farms and sells from here.

The FTC sued in December 2024, accusing Southern Glazer's of violating the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 by denying small shops the discounts and rebates it gave to chains including Total Wine, Walmart and Kroger, even when the stores stood blocks apart, according to the AP. The law permits volume discounts only when a seller can show the lower prices reflect real cost savings from selling in bulk.

Photograph: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress (public domain)

The order covers Southern Glazer's sales to the five largest chain retailers in 26 states, including California. The company must open its books to the monitor twice a year. The FTC's lawsuit originally alleged discrimination in 33 states, but the agency dropped seven states after its investigation did not show the practice occurred there, the AP reported.

The case matters to the wine trade because of Southern Glazer's scale. The FTC says the company generated $26 billion in revenue from wine and spirits sales to retail customers in 2023 and distributes one out of every three bottles of wine and spirits sold in the United States, according to the AP. It is one of the largest privately held companies in the country.

Southern Glazer's admitted no wrongdoing. Its chief legal and compliance officer, Alan Greenspan, said the company did not violate the law, and that it does not expect material changes to its business or pricing practices under the order, Reuters reported. "The proposed order does not outright prohibit Southern Glazer's from engaging in any particular business activity, and we do not anticipate material changes to our business or pricing practices," Greenspan said.

Photograph: Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits

"Small businesses are an invaluable part of the American economy and way of life," FTC Bureau of Competition Director Daniel Guarnera said, in a statement Reuters reported. Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who had voted against filing the suit and said the case was weak, called the settlement the best outcome for all sides. "The order is self-calibrating: Southern pays only where a monitor finds that an independent retailer actually paid more than a competing chain," Ferguson said. "If Southern obeys the law, its compliance costs are low."

The Robinson-Patman comeback

The case was the first FTC enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act in decades, Reuters reported, and a priority of former chair Lina Khan. It moved forward after a federal court denied Southern Glazer's attempt to dismiss it in April 2025. In June, both sides asked the court to pause the litigation while they finalized the settlement terms, just-drinks reported.

What it means for the trade

Wine in most of the country moves through the three-tier system, and Southern Glazer's is the biggest pipe in it. The settlement does not set prices; it creates a penalty-backed reason to narrow the gap between what an independent bottle shop and a chain pay for the same wine. For wineries and growers watching their bottles compete on a crowded shelf, the case is a reminder that the price of a bottle is set twice: once at the winery gate, and again in the gap between the chains and the corner shop. The FTC has ramped up its focus on affordability as the midterm elections approach, weighing a new rule on misleading grocery and food-delivery fees and probing personalized pricing practices, Reuters reported.

The ordinance layers the corridor designation over the existing zoning in three designated areas of unincorporated Monterey County, along River Road, Metz Road in the Central Salinas Valley, and Jolon Road in South County, and it gives eligible projects a formal zoning-clearance route. It allows for up to 10 new, full-scale wineries; wine tasting and visitor-serving activities associated with wineries; large winery events, including weddings with more than 500 people through special-event permits; and inns, employee housing, and other winery-related uses.

Photograph: Danicox40, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The corridor plan was originally adopted as part of the county's 2010 General Plan, when a significant share of the unincorporated area's farmland was in grape production and wine grapes ranked among the county's top-value crops. It was first requested in 2001 by the Monterey County Vintners and Growers Association as a way to keep the local wine industry economically viable. That association disbanded in 2025, and the Monterey County Farm Bureau has carried the industry's voice through this year's review process, from the agricultural advisory committee in April 2025 to the Planning Commission this summer.

The vote arrives as the industry is in a down cycle. Monterey County wine grapes declined 25 percent in gross value in 2025, the second consecutive annual decline, according to the county crop report. "Overall, we're very satisfied with the way this has turned out," said Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau, at the board meeting. "It allows for a lot of flexibility, which I think is really important, particularly as the wine-making industry recovers from the current economic depression that they are in."

Groot added that the corridor's new winery and tasting-room development will take time: "It's probably going to be several years before we get to that point, but this sets us up to be in the right place for that inclusionary development of these entertainment sites as well as the wine tasting rooms."

Photograph: Jim G, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

"Waiting 16 years I think is long enough," Supervisor Chris Lopez said at the meeting. "I know that the industry right now is at a down point, and this is a cyclical market. Hopefully, when they come back, we are open to continue to review and revise, knowing that that may look different when it comes back and having this in place may make it easier for those folks who want to invest along the corridor."

Supervisors also asked staff to come back within 90 days with clearer size limits for kitchen and dining areas, and with answers on employee housing and groundwater.

Paul Passaro has been appointed executive vice president and chief sales officer, effective Oct. 5. He brings more than 25 years of wine and spirits industry experience, most recently as head of sales at O'Neill Vintners & Distillers, and in the new role he will oversee wholesale sales, national accounts, export, sales strategy, analytics, and sales operations.

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Chanel Caplan has been promoted to executive vice president and chief marketing officer, effective Sept. 30. She joined Duckhorn in February 2025 as senior vice president of brand management for premium brands, with more than 15 years in the industry, and will now oversee brand marketing, trade marketing, creative services, and direct-to-consumer.

P.J. Alviso has been promoted to executive vice president and chief operating officer, effective Feb. 1, 2027. He joined the company in 2007 and has worked across nearly two decades in roles starting in the vineyards, then estate vineyard management and grower relations, and later leadership of the Central Coast and Pacific Northwest brands, most recently as senior vice president of operations. He succeeds Zach Rasmuson, who has been with the company since 2003 and served as COO since 2012. Rasmuson will continue in the role through the transition, then join the company's board of directors, and he will continue to lead the company's Founders Fund.

"As we wrap up our 50th anniversary this year, we are thrilled to welcome Paul and to congratulate Chanel and P.J. as they step into their new roles," said The Duckhorn Portfolio CEO Robert Hanson. "Together, these appointments bring the right combination of fresh perspective, deep institutional knowledge, and proven leadership to our executive team as we enter our next phase of growth. Our goal is to be the undisputed leader in American luxury wine, and I am confident that these leaders will be instrumental in helping us achieve that ambition."

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"I've admired The Duckhorn Portfolio since the very beginning of my career, when I had the opportunity to represent these remarkable brands as a sales consultant," Passaro said. "To join an organization I've long respected and be able to contribute to the growth and evolution of this iconic portfolio is incredibly meaningful. It's truly a full-circle moment, and I'm honored and energized by the opportunity to help write the next chapter of Duckhorn's success."

Established in 1976 when vintners Dan and Margaret Duckhorn founded Duckhorn Vineyards, the portfolio today counts eleven wineries, nine winemaking facilities, five tasting rooms, and more than 2,200 acres of vineyards across 38 estate properties, with brands including Duckhorn Vineyards, Decoy, Kosta Browne, Sonoma-Cutrer, Goldeneye, and Greenwing. The company reports U.S. volume of 2.9 million cases annually, according to Impact Databank via Shanken News Daily.

The season's bookends tell the story. Chandon California called its first pick on July 24, the earliest in the winery's 53-year history, breaking a record set on August 3, 2021. Only two other Napa vintages, 2014 and 2015, had ever begun in July. Winemaker Pauline Lhote, who gathered her team in the cool early-morning hours to bring in 30 tons of Chardonnay from the Yountville estate, called it "historic for Napa sparkling and most certainly a first for me," adding: "It is quite literally the earliest start in my 21 harvests at CHANDON."

Photograph: Sarah Stierch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Sonoma County began what may be its earliest harvest on record, and growers there expect one of the lightest crops in recent years after cool, windy weather during bloom cut yields. "This is the earliest harvest I've experienced during my time with Sonoma County Winegrowers," said chief executive Karissa Kruse. "We believe this smaller harvest will help bring supply and demand into better balance and strengthen the long-term outlook for Sonoma County growers, wineries, and the region." At the far end of the season, Napa's Howell Mountain and Spring Mountain districts were still being picked as late as September, according to WineCap's September 29 harvest analysis.

Small berries, high hopes

Quality reports are strong. Sparkling yields at Chandon came in roughly 15 to 20 percent below initial expectations, with millerandage, sometimes called "hen and chicken," visible on a number of clusters, but Lhote described the fruit as good quality. Marcus Notaro of Stag's Leap Wine Cellars is among the winemakers reporting high quality alongside low yields, and WineCap notes that even adjusting for reduced acreage, 2026 looks like a small California crop, though a promising one for quality.

The pattern extends beyond California. WineCap's analysis has the Northern Hemisphere harvest drawing to a close with smaller yields across France, Italy, and California after an unusually hot, dry growing season, and France on course for its smallest harvest since 1957.

Photograph: Sarah Stierch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

A short crop meets a soft market

The paradox of 2026 is that scarcity has not brought strength. Ciatti reports selective replacement buying only, as sluggish consumer wine sales and a lingering surplus of bulk inventory keep a lid on grape prices. Wineries are hesitant to lock in expensive long-term contracts, the broker notes, leaning instead on existing cellar reserves and buying fruit only to fill specific portfolio gaps.

The numbers behind the hesitation are stark. About half of California's 2026 wine grape crop entered the harvest season without contracts with buyers, compared with 70 to 80 percent under contract in a typical year, according to Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, which represents about 500 farmers statewide. At the pandemic peak the state held almost 600,000 acres of vineyards; farmers have since removed or idled roughly a quarter of that land. Wine sales have fallen more than 20 percent over five years.

Third-generation Lodi grower Bill Berryhill, who could not find buyers for grapes on 200 of his 500 acres and plans to remove 50 acres when the season ends, put the year in plain terms: "It's just sickening. You raise a beautiful crop, and it's really a nice vintage this year, and you drop it on the ground. It's sad. All your work is just down the toilet." He added: "I will lose money for sure. It's just a matter of how much. This has been a big loser for three years now." Bitter's assessment of the market was blunter still: "The market is just so depressed that it's difficult to grow them profitably. Demand is not going up. It's still continuing to decline."

The state's preliminary crush report, due in the spring, will put a final number on the 2026 vintage. Until then the trade is left with the central question of the season: whether a short crop can finally bring supply and demand back into balance, or whether soft sales will keep even a light harvest on the wrong side of profitable. As Lhote put it: "Climate change keeps us on our toes. The new reality of winemaking is that we will always need to adapt. This won't be our last surprising harvest!"

The California contingent runs to six labels, according to the program details reported by TravelPulse and Executive Traveller: Silver Oak Cabernet, Trefethen Cabernet, Crossbarn by Paul Hobbs Pinot Noir, Freemark Abbey Chardonnay, Patz & Hall Chardonnay from Sonoma, and St. Supéry Sauvignon Blanc. The international half of the list spans France, Spain, and New Zealand, with Champagne Taittinger expanding to domestic Delta One service from October 1 after appearing only on international routes.

Photograph: Brocken Inaglory, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The program was developed with Master Sommelier Andrea Robinson, who has worked with the airline for more than two decades. For the first time, Delta opened the curation to its own passengers: SkyMiles members joined Robinson in blind tastings that helped shape the final selection. Robinson said of the Trefethen pick, "What makes Trefethen special is its sense of continuity. The family has spent decades investing in the land and refining their craft, and that dedication shines through in every wine they produce."

Why the altitude matters

Altitude changes the glass. Cabin air is pressurized below sea-level pressure and kept very dry, and both mute how a wine smells and tastes on the palate; a bottle that sings at a restaurant table can pour flat at 35,000 feet. Delta judged every candidate in those conditions, scoring freshness, balance, and how the wines would sit alongside food.

For the trade, the program is a placement channel with reach far beyond a tasting room. Silver Oak Cabernet Sauvignon will be poured on international Delta One routes from October 2026 through March 2027; domestic Delta One will feature Trefethen, Crossbarn, and Freemark Abbey in the same window; and St. Supéry will appear on both domestic and international routes through September 2027, with Patz & Hall joining the international selection in April 2027.

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Delta also screened partners on sustainability practices, stewardship of the land, treatment of employees, and community involvement, according to Food and Wine's reporting on the selection process. The emphasis fits a broader pattern: airlines are treating the wine list as brand storytelling, and wine country producers who can document their practices get the seats.

"Our goal was to build a program that delivers exceptional quality while making wine more inviting," said Stephanie Laster, Delta's managing director of onboard experience. "Every label in this collection helps connect customers to remarkable destinations, passionate winemakers and meaningful experiences that extend well beyond the glass." Cabin crew on Delta One routes are trained through the airline's own Sky Sommelier program, so the pour comes with someone who can talk a passenger through the list.

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The demand backdrop explains the pressure. U.S. wine case sales fell 23 percent from 427 million in 2020 to 329 million in 2025, and total wine spending fell 22 percent from $94 billion to $74 billion, according to First Citizens Bank's State of the Wine Industry Report, via the Los Angeles Post. There are fewer cases and fewer dollars, and the fight over them is asymmetric.

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SVB's structural diagnosis, via The Drinks Business, is the sentence every mid-size winery owner should pin to the wall: being stuck in the middle, too big to take a DtC focus and too small to get distributors to sell your brand, is something to be avoided. The middle has the costs of scale without the channels of scale.

The pricing data shows the hourglass. Premium demand remains viable, the report says, but it now requires persuasive value communication and hospitality-led differentiation rather than price increases alone. The $20 to $29 tier and the $100-plus tier show growth expectations; wines below $20 remain weak, continuing the long downtrend in everyday table wine.

The capital markets have noticed. Fewer than one in five surveyed wineries expressed active interest in buying facilities, vineyards, or brands, while 18 percent said a sale within five years was likely. Rising seller interest against falling buyer interest means continued pressure on valuations for undifferentiated assets, and opportunity for well-capitalized buyers who understand today's demand.

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The report's grimmest line is agronomic: more vines must be ripped out. Oversupply does not clear through marketing. It clears through acreage, and the acreage being cleared is the middle's.

The strategic implication is binary, which is why the industry hates it. Get small enough to be a true DtC business, with the customer relationships and hospitality to support it, or get large enough to matter to distributors. The middle is not a strategy. It is a waiting room, and the rent is due.

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.

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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.

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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.

Benessere Vineyards, a 42-acre St. Helena estate with extensive winery entitlements and a private residence on the valley floor along the Napa River, is going to auction. Concierge Auctions announced that the reserve has been met and bidding is officially open at $9 million, as the inaugural offering of the firm's new Global Wine and Vineyard Division, the only auction platform dedicated exclusively to winery and vineyard real estate.

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The property was originally listed at $19 million with Jamie Spratling and Kevin McDonald of Sotheby's International Realty, Wine Country. The auction opens bidding at less than half the original ask, a gap that says more about 2026 price discovery than about the property.

"This is a category that's been hiding in plain sight for years, comprising some of the most complex and compelling real estate in the world," said Chad Roffers, CEO and co-founder of Concierge Auctions, in the firm's announcement. The new division is a bet that wine-country real estate deserves its own marketplace machinery.

The second strategy is the traditional listing, tested at full price. A newly rebuilt small-production winery estate on Atlas Peak is listed at $14,950,000, Sonoma Magazine reported in August: a gated plateau in the Vaca Mountains with a main residence, guesthouse, barn, winery, and 24.5 acres of organically and biodynamically farmed Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in the Atlas Peak AVA.

Photograph: Brocken Inaglory, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Atlas Peak property, founded in 1987 before the AVA existed, includes a new winemaking facility permitted for 8,500 cases. The ask works out to roughly $610,000 per planted acre, before attributing any value to the homes and winery, a reminder that estate pricing is land-plus-lifestyle arithmetic.

Read together, the two properties frame the fall market. The auction route concedes that private-treaty pricing has stalled and invites the market to name the number. The full-price listing bets that the right buyer still pays for turnkey Napa. By winter, both sellers will know which read was right.

The dollar math is the part that should worry the trade. DtC shipment value fell by more than $230 million, and it would have fallen further if the average bottle price had not risen 11 percent, masking weaker volume with higher prices.

Photograph: Sarah Stierch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

That price-versus-volume split tells the story of the year: fewer cases moving, at higher prices, to fewer buyers. It is the same hourglass pressure reshaping the rest of the wine economy, visible here in the channel wineries control most directly.

The report, released with WineBusiness Analytics, is the industry's benchmark for the DtC channel, which for many small wineries is the majority of revenue. Almost three quarters of winery sales run through tasting rooms and wine clubs, according to survey data cited in the Silicon Valley Bank 2026 DTC report.

The volume decline lands on top of a second blow: fewer visitors are coming through tasting room doors at all. SVB's survey of 450 wineries found tasting room fees fell an average of 6 percent last year, yet only about a quarter of wineries reported revenue growth in 2025.

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For winery finance teams, the read-across is direct. DtC has been the highest-margin channel in the business; a 15 percent volume contraction there compresses the exact revenue stream that has subsidized everything else, from farming to hospitality payrolls.

The open question for 2026 is whether the price lever has room left. The average bottle price rose 11 percent while volume fell 15 percent. If buyers push back on price next, wineries lose the cushion that kept the value decline to 6 percent.

The program's wage floor just survived a courtroom. On August 26, 2026, U.S. District Judge Kirk E. Sherriff of the Eastern District of California ruled in United Farm Workers et al. v. DOL that the Department of Labor's October 2025 interim final rule changing how the Adverse Effect Wage Rate is calculated was unlawful, finding key portions arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act, according to Envoy Global's analysis of the decision.

Photograph: State Government Photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The stakes in that rule were enormous. Farmworker advocates argued the 2025 methodology change cut wages by as much as $7 an hour in certain states. The UFW Foundation called it one of the largest wealth transfers from workers to employers in U.S. agricultural history, projecting it would deprive workers of $2.46 billion a year, as reported by Stacker.

But the court declined to vacate the rule, leaving the challenged wage rates temporarily in effect while the department builds a replacement methodology, to avoid disruption to the agricultural labor market. Harvest, as ever, does not wait for appellate calendars.

Then came the backpay warning. On September 2, 2026, the department's Office of Foreign Labor Certification notified employers that wage-adjustment payments may eventually be required for H-2A workers and U.S. workers in corresponding employment who worked during a backpay period running from September 2 until new rates issue, if the replacement rates exceed what was paid, according to WisLawNOW and BAL Immigration. No back-pay obligation exists yet, but growers are now told to preserve complete payroll records and keep workers' contact information current.

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The H-2A pipeline itself keeps widening. The Department of Labor has projected the program could grow from 383,000 workers in 2025 to more than 500,000 by 2034, and in June the Department of Homeland Security moved to open the seasonal H-2A workforce to the non-seasonal dairy industry, Stacker reported.

For winery operators, the labor line item is no longer a commodity cost to be minimized; it is a compliance and continuity risk to be managed. The growers who harvest cleanly this year are the ones treating payroll records with the same seriousness as spray schedules, because the backpay period is already running.

An auction is not an admission of failure. It is a mechanism for discovering the price when private negotiation has stopped producing one. The $10 million gap between the original ask and the auction open is not the property's shame; it is the market's information, delivered in public, where everyone can use it.

Photograph: Missvain, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Consider the alternative, which is the current norm: a vineyard estate listed at an aspirational number, sitting for a year, taking quiet price cuts, with every buyer in the valley doing the same subtraction in private. That process discovers the same price, slower, with more embarrassment and less competition.

Concierge Auctions' bet, a dedicated Global Wine and Vineyard Division, is that wine-country real estate is a large enough asset class to deserve real market machinery: reserves, open bidding, a global audience. For a category where comparable sales are scarce and every property is unique, the auction format may actually be more honest than the listing format.

The column's prediction: within two years, the auction block will be a routine channel for vineyard estates above $5 million, and the stigma will look as dated as the idea that selling wine at auction meant the winery was failing. Price discovery is a service. The trade should pay for it, use it, and stop whispering about it.

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The six-month figures: 536.8 million litres imported, worth 2.43 billion euros, a spending decline of 816.4 million euros against the first half of 2025. The average import price per litre fell 10.1 percent to 4.52 euros.

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The cause, in OIVE's reading, is the 15 percent tariff on European Union products that took effect last August and remained in place for the full half year, layered on top of a general drift away from wine among U.S. consumers.

France and Italy still dominated by value, together accounting for more than 70 percent of U.S. wine import value, but both fell hard: French shipments dropped 25 percent to 955.8 million euros, Italy fell by a similar proportion to 791 million euros. New Zealand was third at 208.1 million euros, down 14 percent; Spain fourth at 133.7 million euros, down 20.9 percent. In absolute volume terms, Australia showed the biggest reduction, shipping 25.9 million litres less than a year earlier.

Bottled wine bore the brunt. The category, 70 percent of imports, fell 12.4 percent in volume and 26.6 percent in value to 318 million litres worth 1.69 billion euros, with the average bottled price down 16.2 percent to 5.32 euros a litre. Bulk imports fell 36.4 percent in value to 85.9 million euros. The only growth segment was bag-in-box, up 49 percent in volume but still tiny at 16.3 million euros.

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For the domestic trade, the import collapse cuts two ways. U.S. producers face less price competition on shelves, but importers, distributors, and retailers built on European portfolios are absorbing a demand shock, and the tariff is ultimately paid somewhere in the chain, most of it by American buyers.

The second-half data will show whether the first-half drop was front-loaded panic or the new baseline. Either way, the 2026 import book is now the weakest in recent memory, and the trade's sourcing math has changed for as long as the tariff stands.

The demand collapse behind the slide is now quantified. U.S. wine case sales fell 23 percent from 427 million in 2020 to 329 million in 2025, while total wine spending fell 22 percent from $94 billion to $74 billion, according to First Citizens Bank, formerly Silicon Valley Bank, in its annual State of the Wine Industry Report, via the Los Angeles Post.

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Trade policy has taken a further $522 million off the table. Inc., citing Associated Press reporting, puts that as the cost of Canada's boycott of American alcohol to U.S. wineries, a boycott imposed by Canadian provinces in retaliation for U.S. tariffs starting in March 2025.

Land priced on the earnings of the boom years is being marked to the earnings of the bust. A vineyard's value is the present value of the grapes it can sell at the prices the market will pay, and both the tons and the prices have moved against the seller since 2020.

The underwriting variable that has moved most is water. With groundwater regulation tightening under SGMA and surface supplies volatile, appraisers and buyers now price water security alongside soil and AVA. A vineyard with firm water is a different asset than the same vineyard without it, and the spread is widening.

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For buyers, the message is patience with a purpose. Distressed sellers will surface through 2026, from the Central Valley to the North Coast, and the best parcels will trade quietly before they ever reach a listing. For sellers, the message is the auction block's: the market will find the price, with or without your ask.

The capital is following the forecast. Treasury Wine Estates has built a $15 million dealcoholisation facility in Australia's Barossa Valley, unveiled in February, using a proprietary Flavour Lock process that captures and reintroduces the wine's aromatic essence during alcohol removal.

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The facility produces the next generation of no-and-low wines for TWE brands including Squealing Pig and Pepperjack, alongside existing offerings under Matua, 19 Crimes, Lindeman's, and Wolf Blass. TWE also launched Sorbet, a low-alcohol brand developed with Endeavour Group.

The strategic logic is demographic, not moral. With half of the world's regular wine drinkers moderating alcohol intake, according to Food and Drink Business, the category is recruiting occasions, not just drinkers: the lunch pour, the weeknight glass, the buyer who still wants the ritual without the alcohol.

For California producers, the question is whether no-and-low is a parallel industry or a cannibal. The early evidence from TWE's approach suggests the former: the facility is framed as building a hub of innovation and sustainability in the Barossa, an additive bet rather than a concession.

Photograph: W.carter, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The trade's skeptics note that no-alcohol wine remains a small base, and that 36 percent growth from a small base is still small. The bull case is that it is the only segment where the growth line points up and to the right without an asterisk, and capital is voting accordingly.

The proposals, published on TTB's notices of proposed rulemaking page, would put standardized serving facts and allergen declarations on the bottle, ending decades in which alcohol was the notable exception to American food-labeling transparency.

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The compliance runway is long but real. TTB says the proposed allergen requirements would begin five years after a final rule takes effect, according to the bureau's featured guidance, a timeline that acknowledges the label-redesign cycle across thousands of SKUs.

Wine Law on Reserve's analysis walks through the mechanics: which products are covered, what the Alcohol Facts panel must contain, and how the allergen disclosure interacts with existing sulfite labeling. The short version is that every winery's label approval workflow, the COLA pipeline, gets a new mandatory module.

The trade's strategic question is not whether the rule arrives but in what form. The comment record will shape serving-size definitions, format tolerances, and small-producer accommodations, and the wineries that engage now will live with the result for decades.

Photograph: Murgh, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

For an industry already redesigning labels for California's CRV marking, the TTB proposals mean the next label cycle should be planned as a two-regulation project. Redesign once, comply twice, or pay for the press twice.

The district numbers show where the hole is deepest. Napa County's District 4 averaged $6,767.53 a ton, down 2.6 percent from the prior year. Sonoma and Marin's District 3 averaged $2,761.37, down 5.7 percent. Prices fell, but the real story is the missing tons: the market did not just get cheaper, it got smaller.

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California AgNet's reporting on the preliminary report framed the drop as a continuation of the industry's managed contraction: fewer tons crushed, lower averages paid, and an ongoing varietal shift as wineries buy for the wines that actually sell.

For grape buyers, the arithmetic for 2026 is inverted from the usual. In a buyer's market for price, the binding constraint is becoming availability of the right fruit under contract. Spot-market Cabernet at a discount is no substitute for contracted tons of the varieties your program needs.

The 72-million-case hole also reframes the bulk glut. The tank-space crisis of this summer coexists with a genuine crop shortfall, which means the oversupply is a mismatch problem, the wrong wine in the wrong tanks, more than an absolute one.

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Watch the 2026 crush report the way a trader watches inventory data. The refill year will tell the trade whether the contraction is stabilizing into a smaller, healthier industry, or whether the hole is getting deeper.

One market explains most of it. Exports to Canada fell $343 million, down 77 percent, accounting for roughly four fifths of the total decline. China fell $69 million, down 73 percent. The United Kingdom fell $14 million, down 8 percent, and Panama $11 million, down 74 percent.

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The first three quarters told the same story in starker terms: a 31.4 percent value drop, with Canada down 74.4 percent in value on a 61.1 percent volume decline and a 34.1 percent fall in average price per litre, and China down 73.4 percent in value, according to Empresa Exterior's analysis of the Del Rey AWM data.

The composition of the loss matters. Average export price per litre fell from $5.31 to $4.15 across the first nine months, a 21.8 percent decline, which means the trade lost both volume and pricing power at once. When buyers return, they will return at lower price points.

The scale asymmetry is worth stating plainly. U.S. wine exports run about one seventh of U.S. wine imports by value. America is a wine-importing nation that exports at the margin, and the margin just got much thinner.

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For California wineries with export programs, the 2025 numbers argue for triage: defend the United Kingdom, where the decline was modest, and treat Canada and China as rebuilds measured in years, not quarters.

The headline rate tells only half the story. The STR report breaks the county by jurisdiction and service tier, and the splits show a familiar pattern: luxury properties holding rate while the middle of the market competes on occupancy. In a valley where the average night costs $400, the guest mix matters more than the headcount.

Photograph: Sarah Stierch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The pattern is a mature luxury destination managing through softer demand with rate discipline rather than discounting, protecting the long-run price position at the cost of short-run occupancy.

For the wine trade, lodging economics are upstream of tasting room economics. The visitor who pays $400 for the room is the visitor who can pay $79 for the tasting and join the club. When occupancy softens at the top tier, the tasting room feels it two quarters later.

The 2026 watch item is whether rate discipline holds. If luxury ADR cracks, the valley's entire visitor-value chain reprices downward, from the tasting fee to the bottle price. If it holds, Napa keeps its position as the premium end of American wine tourism, at the cost of fewer, richer visitors.

Photograph: Sarah Stierch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The rule is specific about the trigger and the duties. The state workers' health unit, WOSHTEP, publishes the compliance guide: check the AQI before and during shifts, reduce or relocate work when the air worsens, communicate the hazard in a language workers understand, and have N95s on hand before they are needed, not after.

Photograph: ליזי שאנן, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

The University of California's safety offices translate the standard into crew-level practice: supervisors check official AQI sources, move the most strenuous tasks to cleaner-air hours, and enforce the respirator supply as personal protective equipment, not as an optional comfort.

For growers, the economics are straightforward and new. A smoke event that idles a crew for two days does not move the harvest window; it compresses it, which means overtime, night picks under lights, or fruit left hanging. The compliance cost is real, but the unpicked-fruit cost is larger.

The deeper shift is cultural. A decade ago, smoke was an act of God discussed after the fact. Now it is a line item in the harvest budget, with a regulation number, a monitoring protocol, and a paper trail that Cal/OSHA can audit.

Photograph: Olivier Lemoine (https://Photo-Terroir.fr), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The growers who treat 5141.1 as harvest infrastructure, stocked respirators, trained foremen, a written smoke plan, will pick through the next bad-air week. The ones who treat it as paperwork will learn the difference the expensive way.

The money mechanics, per CalRecycle's rules as explained by SevenFifty Daily: distributors pay the redemption value into the state fund on every container sold in California, 5 cents for containers under 24 ounces, 10 cents for 24 ounces and larger, and 25 cents for boxes, bladders, and pouches. The distributor charges the buyer, sends the money to the state minus a 1.5 percent administrative discount, and the consumer gets it back at a redemption center.

Photograph: © 2008 by Tomasz Sienicki [user: tsca, mail: tomasz.sienicki at gmail.com], via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The definition of distributor is the part that surprised the trade. It covers any entity, in state or out, that sells directly in California, including wineries selling direct to consumer or to bars, restaurants, and stores without a wholesaler. If you ship DtC into California, you are in the system.

The label deadline has passed. Since July 1, 2025, covered containers must bear the CRV marking, "CA Redemption Value" or an approved variant, with specific size and placement rules by material. A legal memo from Dickenson Peatman and Fogarty notes the one meaningful carve-out: wine sold for on-site consumption in a tasting room is exempt. Everything sold for off-site consumption is in.

The scale is large. The Container Recycling Institute estimates Californians buy about 1.3 billion wine and liquor bottles a year, and projects the expansion adds 500 million containers a year to recycling, lifting the state's glass beverage recycling rate from around 30 percent toward 59 percent.

Photograph: Murgh, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

For winery operators, the bottle bill is now a standing cost of selling in California: reporting, payments to CalRecycle, processing fees by material, and label real estate. The wineries that built it into their 2026 label cycles are fine. The ones still treating it as news have a compliance gap.