The California wine industry is big. How big? We often talk in terms of millions and billions when describing the wine business and its impacts. Some stats follow--mostly taken from The Wine Institute, an advocacy group for the California wine industry.
Ranking
California produces about 90% of all American wine. Worldwide it ranks behind only Italy, Spain, and France in wine production.
Wineries
California has 4,500 wineries producing 225 million cases of wine worth almost $25 billion in the retail market. The number of wineries has doubled since 2005 and this is four times the number from just 17 years ago! Most are small, family-owned businesses.
Grape growing
There are nearly 6,000 grape growers farming over 600,000 acres of wine grapes harvesting almost four million tons of grapes. That's approaching 1,000 square miles of wine grapes planted! This is wine grapes only and doesn't include the nearly 200,000 acres of tables grapes and raisins.
Sales
In the U.S. retail market three out of every five bottles sold is a wine from California. One out of every five bottles of California wine purchased is Chardonnay.
Jobs
This all creates over 300,000 jobs in California and over 800,000 nationwide. In the state's wine regions 21 million people visit annually spending over $2 billion.
Giving back
Something you maybe didn't know is that all wineries have someone handling donations. They give over $100 million to charities every year.
Sonoma County
Sonoma is really a small piece of the California wine scene with about 5% of the state's total wine production.
There are 450 wineries and 1,500 grape growers. The largest vineyard owners are Gallo and Kendall-Jackson.
Sonoma County has committed to sustainable farming of all wine grapes by 2019. We are almost two-thirds of the way there.
Over seven million visitors come to Sonoma County annually.
The wine industry's economic impact is over $13 billion (production, sales, tourism, etc).
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