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Friday, October 18, 2019

California's Wine Glut

California is now in a too much wine in the pipeline status. What's the mean for the buyer? In general, too much product means lower prices until the demand catches up. How does that work with wine?


Several years of large crop sizes at harvest (2018 was huge) got us here. Even with this excess juice coming in prices were still going up and that can't last forever. For the next couple years there will be bargains as people try to get rid of excess wine, essentially a perishable product.

The first big glut hit the young California premium wine business in the mid-80s. Remember, the state had just really entered the premium wine market as a real player a decade earlier and wineries couldn't open fast enough. Then there was too much wine (so I guess the wineries did open fast enough). What you didn't find was wineries lowering their retail prices. They handled the oversupply in other ways.
(1) There were large discounts to distributors especially by the big players.
(2) A lot of the premium wineries came out with second labels with lower prices or just a new line of cheaper wines within their main label.

Fine, 2019 isn't 1985 because we no longer have big hair and leg warmers. What to expect? First, the bad news. If you were hoping that $65 single vineyard Pinot Noir you love will drop to $45 don't hold your breath. If, however, you shop at around $15-20 you might find some pretty good wines -- stuff that used to go into much pricier bottles.

We'll see. Note that these wine oversupplies weren't caused by a large downturn in demand, but by a temporary uptick in supply.

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