Many California growers can’t find buyers as the industry produces more wine grapes than the market wants. Wine sales have decreased by more than 20% over a five-year period, causing prices paid for grapes to drop and prompting California growers to take roughly a quarter of the state’s vineyards out of production. Third-generation grower Bill Berryhill said it means another year of losing money and wasting hundreds of tons of healthy grapes.

Berryhill, who owns Berryhill Family Vineyards near Lodi in the San Joaquin Valley, said he can’t find buyers for grapes grown on 200 of his 500 acres. He plans to remove 50 acres of vineyards when the harvest season is over. At its peak during the pandemic, California had almost 600,000 acres of vineyards, but farmers have removed or stopped actively growing wine grapes on roughly 25% of that land, said Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers.

This year, about half of California’s wine grape crop entered the harvest season without contracts with buyers, compared with 70 to 80% with contracts in a typical year. Even as growers have abandoned or removed tens of thousands of acres of vineyards in California in recent years, too many grapes are still being produced. The downturn is a dramatic shift for the wine industry in California, which produces more than 80% of U.S. wine.