Currently, you can find 2020 white wines on the store shelves and lots of 2019 reds. The problem is with the 2020 vintage, with wildfire smoke, drought, and pandemic issues cutting into the amount of wine grapes turned into wine.
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| Wearing a mask for protection from smoke image from KQED |
For Washington state, at 178,000 tons, the harvest was 11% lower than in 2019. Oregon harvested 75,000 tons, that was 29% lower than 2019. The California the harvest was 3.5 million tons or 14% lower than in 2019. These three West Coast states represent about 92% of all American wine.
For California, the vast majority of the fruit comes from the inland Central Valley and is often used in inexpensive wines. The North Coast region's (Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake counties) 2020 harvest of 340,000 tons was a whopping 33% off the 2019 totals. Most was in red grapes that weren't picked because of smoke damage. The total value of the 2020 crop was about half of the previous year. Farther south, there were smoke issues in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, leading to less wine made.
These shortages are showing up now in white wines and in the next year or two for red wines. Lower supply usually means higher prices.
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