California Wine Growers Face Ruin as Plummeting Demand Leaves Half the Harvest Without Buyers

California wine grape growers are enduring one of their most brutal harvest seasons in decades, with roughly half of the state’s 2026 crop entering picking season without any contracted buyers, as American wine consumption continues its steep decline.

The crisis, reported by the Associated Press, has forced farmers across the state’s premier wine regions to make impossible choices: harvest at a financial loss, abandon grapes on the vine, or rip out vineyards their families have tended for generations.

Wine sales in the United States have fallen more than 20 percent over the past five years. Case sales dropped from 427 million in 2020 to 329 million in 2025, while total consumer spending on wine fell from $94 billion to $74 billion, according to First Citizens Bank’s annual State of the Wine Industry Report.

For third-generation grower Bill Berryhill, the collapse is deeply personal. Standing in a vineyard of unsold merlot grapes near Lodi in the San Joaquin Valley, he described the anguish of wasting a healthy crop.

“It’s just sickening,” Berryhill said. “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”.

Berryhill owns Berryhill Family Vineyards and farms 500 acres. He cannot find buyers for grapes on 200 of those acres. He plans to remove 50 acres of vines once harvest ends. At 68 years old, he is facing his third consecutive year of losses.

“I will lose money for sure. It’s just a matter of how much,” he said. “This has been a big loser for three years now”.

The scale of the retrenchment is staggering. At its pandemic peak, California had nearly 600,000 acres of wine vineyards. Farmers have since removed or stopped actively farming roughly 25 percent of that land, according to Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, which represents about 500 farmers statewide.

In a typical year, 70 to 80 percent of the California wine grape crop is already under contract before harvest begins. This year, that figure dropped to roughly 50 percent, leaving growers with little leverage in price negotiations and few outlets for their fruit.

Even the lucky ones who find buyers are often selling uncontracted grapes at a loss to processors making concentrated syrup, a far cry from the premium prices vineyards once commanded.

Bitter said the market has become so weak that many vineyards simply cannot be farmed profitably anymore. He noted that despite massive acreage removals in recent years, the state is still producing more grapes than buyers want.

“The market is just so depressed that it’s difficult to grow them profitably,” Bitter said. “Demand is not going up. It’s still continuing to decline”.

The pain is not confined to vineyard owners. Kyle Collins, a Lodi-based operations manager with Allied Grape Growers, recently inspected ripe petite verdot grapes in a vineyard that has no buyer. He said the downturn is rippling through the local economy, hitting farmworkers and related businesses hard.

“Unfortunately, we do not have a buyer for these grapes,” Collins said. “That’s unfortunately a reality for not just this vineyard but a lot of us around here”.

“That’s not getting into the pockets of the people doing the field labor, the farmworkers,” he added. “It does have a trickle effect in the economy”.

The downturn marks a dramatic reversal for an industry that produces more than 80 percent of American wine. For decades, California’s wine sector expanded steadily as baby boomers embraced cabernet, chardonnay, zinfandel, and other varietals. Sales peaked during the pandemic in 2021 when restaurants closed and people stocked up to drink at home.

But the post-pandemic period brought a swift and sustained decline. Analysts point to multiple forces: older Americans aging out of the market, younger adults drinking less alcohol overall, and intensifying competition from craft beer, spirits, ready-to-drink cocktails, and cannabis.

The problem is global. Worldwide wine consumption fell 2.7 percent in 2025 from the previous year and was down 14 percent from 2018, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine. That makes it harder for California to offload surplus inventory into export markets.

Trade barriers have compounded the challenge. Industry officials say tariffs have hurt exports, including sales to Canada, which had been the largest foreign market for U.S. wine. Higher production costs in the U.S. compared to countries like Argentina and Australia further erode California’s ability to compete abroad on price.

Some growers are already pivoting to alternative crops with stronger demand, including almonds, walnuts, pistachios, and olives. But for families who have devoted generations to vineyards, the transition represents both an economic and emotional rupture.

With global consumption still falling and no sign of a demand recovery on the horizon, California’s wine grape growers face the prospect of more losses, more vineyard removals, and a painful restructuring of an industry that once seemed unstoppable.