Red Mountain, in Washington, is among the state's premier wine-growing spots.
Sarah Goedhart watches as a hulking mechanical harvester straddles a row of grapes at her family’s vineyard – Hedges Family Estate. It rattles the vines from both sides and all her hard work drops onto a conveyer belt and then gets dumped on the ground.
“It’s wine that’s never gonna be made,” Goedhart said. “And for a vintage as good as we’re having this year, it’s pretty painful.”
Goedhart is the top winemaker here and has been through almost two dozen harvests. But this is the first year she’s thrown fruit away.
That’s because her cellar is stuffed to the rafters with barrels of the previous two years of wine that haven’t sold.
“It’s pretty typical to have the previous vintage in barrel during harvest, but not two vintages in barrels,” Goedhart said.
It’s the crush season across the country – when winemakers usually pick their grapes and start making new wine.
But with the world wine market sluggish the last few years, many in the U.S. industry say they’re so backed up with unsold wine that they’re dropping grapes to the ground or not harvesting them at all. Some say it’s the worst year the wine industry has seen in decades.
Glass half empty
At Hedges, they’re harvesting half of their grapes, and dropping half. If they leave the fruit on the vine, Goedhart said the plants could be at risk of fungus and diseases. She said they want to make sure the vines stay healthy so they can keep producing wine if the market bounces back.
“What everyone is saying in the industry is we’re at the low of the low and it’s going to get better,” Goedhart said. “And we’re going to readjust.”
Hedges’ sales last year were down 13% from the year before. And to balance, they’ve cut about that in expenses and staff to keep solvent.
Now, her family is having to dip into personal assets.
These types of struggles for wineries aren’t just happening in Washington.
Wine decline
Washington is the second largest wine producing state in the country after California.
“Today, the California wine industry is facing one of the most serious downturns that we’ve seen in decades,” said Natalie Collins, the president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers. “And it’s not really because of one singular issue, it is a combination of challenges all hitting at once.”
She said the uncertainty of tariffs is causing uncertainty in the markets, for one. And retaliatory measures from other countries have hit exports hard.
But also, over the past few years, she said global demand for wine has declined. In part that’s due to competition from other beverages – like beers, ciders, seltzers, cocktails, NA drinks and cannabis products. There are also increasing concerns about the health risks of drinking alcohol.
“We’re seeing new generations not drinking as much alcohol as past generations have,” Collins said.
She said that’s led to an oversupply of wine globally. In California, some growers are ripping out their vineyards – which is costly. It’s cheaper to burn a vineyard – but some areas don’t allow that.
“So what we’re seeing as a result of that,” Collins said, “is that growers are leaving their vineyards abandoned.”
She said these let-go acres could be more vulnerable to things like bugs and rats. Infestations could spread to neighboring growers.
Hardship and pain
Meanwhile on the East Coast, Chris King with the New York State Wine Grape Growers said he knows of several vineyards that are very near to going out of business.
“It’s your neighbors,” King said. “You feel their hardship. You feel their pain. And to see somebody who has put their life and their fortune, and their dreams into this business and have it go away is just really sad to watch.”
While right now the impact of the grape glut is mostly being felt by those in the wine industry, some think that eventually it could impact consumers.
Adam Schulz runs the Incredible Bulk Wine Company in Washington state – which makes matches between winemakers and companies looking for bulk wine or wine grapes.
“At some point we’re going to cross the threshold where there isn’t enough bulk wine inventory, there aren’t enough grapes in the ground,” Schulz said.
He said that as more vineyards scale back – the industry could eventually resize so small that years from now, we might be looking at a wine shortage.
