cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52489248
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.
Too many negatives to alcohol for me. Even a single beer with a meal can make it more difficult to sleep sometimes, which isn’t worth the relaxation it brings.
I tried some non alcoholic beer when it was at Costco once, and actually really liked it, but it’s way too expensive normally (more than regular beer!), and Costco dropped it fast, so I just stick with flavored sugar free drink mixes sometimes mixed with flavored seltzer water.
Shit is too expensive
Also I’m pretty sure people are turning away from the addictive poison, especially the young generation. They’re more into weed vape carts.
$4.00 a bottle at Aldi.
That’s not for drinking, my friend, that’s for cooking.
You gotta have at least $10 a bottle for drinking.
(More seriously, even cheap wine is a luxury, and as people’s income-to-costs ratio shrinks, booze is far easier to let go rather than your electricity bill.)
They’ve extracted all the value by pricing each link in the chain to where things will basically barely break even.
I’m kinda a California wine nerd. I’ve toured a bunch of vineyards and wineries, including some legendary vineyards where a particular row was known to produce award winning grapes bottled by another. But whether you own the land and lease out a particular parcel or row, grow/harvest them yourself and sell the fruit, process the fruit and sell the juice, ferment the juice and sell to blenders, or blend/bottle it yourself and sell as finished product, each link in the chain is basically impossible to find excess value anymore. It’s all efficiently priced, which means that there aren’t too many cheap hidden gems anymore, and any fruit capable of creating good product basically commands exactly the right price for the landowner to barely break even on their mortgage (or the opportunity cost of selling the land to another).
The drop in mid-range demand basically has destroyed the economic viability of the California wine industry. The big splashy names are still doing great, and the global conglomerates can pump out huge volumes of inoffensive wine, but it’s gotten really difficult for independent winemakers to produce good $10-40 wine and sell them at volumes that will pay the bills.
When edibles are cheaper and better for you…
