Unemployment is low. It's a great market to be looking for a job. On the other side the employers are hurting for people. It seems almost every local winery is looking for everything from a wine club manager to a finance guru to a part-time tasting room person. There's no doubt this hurts their customer service. But there's something even bigger looming.
The grape harvest is coming. Wineries need to staff up for grape picking and turning that fruit into wine. Many of those jobs, especially in the vineyards, come from migrant labor. For political and economic reasons that pool of labor is small. It's not just wineries that need harvest help. Any large scale agricultural business relies on migrant labor.
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| Without these people the wine industry is toast |
In the cellar extra help usually comes from other parts of the country or the world. There's even a shortage of truck drivers. Truck drivers? On a peak day during harvest season there might be 2,000 trucks full of grapes on the road somewhere in California.
So what might this mean? Will some grapes not get picked, some wine not made? Maybe. Will some grapes not be picked or processed at their optimum time? Likely. It's more likely labor costs will be higher for the 2018 harvest. Wineries in the Napa/Sonoma area could be hardest hit as housing costs are especially high there.
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