99% of wine regions have a surplus. They are overproducing and shooting past the demand curve, which has been descending slightly over the past few years. That is the big problem in Washington. We were growing 7-10% a year for decades following the growing demand for our wines. Demand flattened a couple of years ago, and we, along with almost everyone else, shot way past it.
Small farmers like us, dependent upon visitors to our farms, have been suffering from traffic loss since 2020. Wine tourism crashed. Fortunately, our newsletter readers, yes, you!, have kept us going.
One big company, Chateau Sainte Michelle Wine Estates, produced two-thirds of Washington wine. To reduce surplus inventories, they cut contracts by 40%.
40% of 2/3 of 270,000 tons is a lot. 72,000 tons of homeless grapes! 4.5 million cases, 54 million bottles, 3,000 truckloads of grapes. Big trucks, fully loaded, 25 tons each.
So this year is shaping up as a lovely vintage with above-average conditions, but there are a lot of grapes that will feed the birds. It is a bumper year for starlings, and there is simply no place to use them (the grapes, not the starlings).
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds (starlings?)
Baked in a pie.
A number of countries are subsidizing vineyard removal and/or converting wine into industrial ethanol. The French government just asked the ED for more cash to remove vines, 120 million Euros in subsidies to remove 30,000 hectares of French vineyards. In the USA, we don’t subsidize wine; we tax it.
My apple-growing neighbors are also facing the challenges of a large supply, low prices, and high costs. They just hope not to lose too much this year. Orchards and vineyards are for sale!
And then, Mother Nature decides to play a trick and blows down many rows of the apple orchard across the street.
If you pull your grapes, what can you plant that isn’t being overproduced?
The inflation in groceries isn’t due to farmers. It’s the corporations that control the processing, distribution, and retail of our food supply. A few companies control significant parts of the market share in their categories. Walmart, Costco, Kroger’s, Con Agra, Del Monte, and PepsiCo have way more to do with the big increase in food prices than all the farmers on Earth.
We are selling some of our grapes to other small wineries. Since we are retiring from wine production, the grapes we haven’t sold will get returned to earth via wildlife, Miss Piggy, the sheep, and microbes.
It is painful to see the work that Bertha, Carlos, and I exerted over the past 11 months go unrewarded.
But 7 of our 15 cultivars will be made into wine this vintage. I’m still hoping for more, but there are a lot of folks marketing grapes! I know a number of folks who do it as a full-time job for larger growers. Hopefully, we can find more folks in the future to use our grapes to make beautiful wines.
Home winemaker? Give us a call, we do have some lovely stuff.
