half the crop had no buyer
About half of California’s wine grapes went into this harvest with nobody contracted to buy them. A vineyard cannot respond to that the way a factory can.
The Associated Press reported on 22 September that roughly half of California’s wine grape crop entered harvest season without a buyer contract. In a normal year that figure is twenty to thirty percent — seventy to eighty percent of the crop goes in already sold.
The rest of the picture: wine sales down more than twenty percent over five years. Growers have pulled something like a quarter of the state’s vineyard acreage out of production, tens of thousands of acres abandoned or torn out. Fruit that does find a buyer often goes at a loss to producers of concentrated syrup. Growers are choosing between harvesting at a loss, leaving the fruit hanging, or ripping out the vines for almonds, walnuts, pistachios, olives.
What I keep turning over is that a vineyard has no short-run output decision.
A factory with no orders runs one shift instead of three. A wheat farmer with a bad price signal plants something else in the spring — the decision cycle and the growing cycle are the same length, so the information arrives in time to act on it. That is the ordinary case, and it is ordinary enough that most of how we talk about supply assumes it.
Grapevines take three to four years to bear a commercial crop and then produce for decades. Every acre standing in Lodi or Paso Robles this September encodes a demand forecast somebody made in 2019, or 2012, or 1998. The forecast has since been wrong for five consecutive years, and the vines have no way to learn this. They set fruit anyway. They set fruit whether or not a contract exists, whether or not the grower can pay the picking crew, whether or not anyone in the state wants another ton of cabernet.
The only lever a perennial grower has is destruction. You cannot idle a vine. You can farm it at a loss, abandon it and watch it go feral, or run a machine down the row and pull thirty years of root system out of the ground. There is no middle setting. The supply curve doesn’t bend; it breaks, and it breaks in whole blocks, permanently, at whatever moment enough individual growers independently decide they are done.
Which produces the ugly timing problem underneath all of this. Removals are running now, in the trough. The three-to-four-year lag means today’s removals take supply out of the market in 2029 and 2030. If American drinking habits stabilise before then — and there is no particular reason they will, but they might — the correction will overshoot into a shortage, prices will spike, and the surviving growers will plant. Into a market that will have moved again by the time those vines bear.
The replant options are not an escape from this. Almonds bear in three years and run for twenty-five. Pistachios take five to seven and can go eighty. Olives similar. A grower tearing out cabernet for pistachios is not de-risking; they are placing the same class of bet, with a longer fuse, on a different commodity, alongside every one of their neighbors reading the same price signals and reaching the same conclusion in the same season. That is how the next glut gets planted, and it is being planted right now.
The thing that stays with me is the fruit itself. Somewhere in the Central Valley this month there are blocks nobody is going to pick — fully ripe, perfectly good, the product of a year of pruning and irrigation and frost watch — hanging on the vine because the cost of taking it off exceeds anything it can be sold for. It will raisin on the cane, and then it will fall, and the vine will start setting buds for next year’s crop, which also has no buyer.
Sources: California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops, AP via KPBS ↗ · California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops, AP via WCAX ↗ · 5 questions about California’s wine grape crisis, Washington Times ↗