Don’t call it sour grapes but an April Allied Grapes Growers forum suggested the California wine industry needs to pull up to 50,000 acres to right-size plantings with demand.
“The California wine industry continues to be structurally
oversupplied (too many acres), but unusually weak wine shipment
performance since 2022 has magnified our issue.
• We are not “over-planting”; we are “under-removing”.
• Plantings in 2024 and 2025 are expected to moderate significantly,
but that doesn’t help us today; we need to adjust bearing acreage.
• +/-50,000 acres need to be removed to reduce our bearing acres
by 30,000 (almost 20,000 acres are newly bearing in 2024).”
The latests USDA grape acreage report does show a downturn in bearing acres in California for all types of grapes. Wine grapes are down about 15,000 acres between 2022 and 2023.
