California's once-mighty wine industry is on the ropes

California’s $84 billion-per-year wine business is struggling across the board. Boutique and family-owned labels, mid-sized independent grape growers and large-scale corporate enterprises are all deciding whether to pull their vines and pursue another cash crop, and economists and experts agree that it’s been generations since the industry outlook has been this bleak.

But, even in one of its darkest moments in nearly a century, there is still hope from industry experts that this is also the time when opportunities arise.

The reality, however, is many may not make it to the turning point.

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Founded in 1990, the family-run business is located in the northern San Joaquin Valley, mostly in and around Ripon, Clarksburg and Lodi. It has been heralded for helping bring sustainability, credibility and wine enthusiasts to a previously overlooked region.

Awarded the California Green Medal for sustainable winegrowing in 2016 and another Green Medal for its work in its community in 2022, McManis has an award-winning portfolio of wines. From pinot grigio to merlot, they have been some of the most highly sought after varietals from the region.

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But now, nearly untenable economic headwinds — including a Canadian boycott of American wines triggered by the Trump administration — have combined with other factors and industry trends to put the winery and associated vineyards on the market.

The winery’s exports to Canada fell by about 95% from 75,000 cases down to 1,000 cases between July 2025 and July 2026, the Sacramento Bee reported. The winery sold just 1,000 cases to Canada during that period, a massive drop. (McManis declined to be interviewed for this article.)

But it’s not just McManis that is feeling the pinch. According to the Wine Institute, a policy advocacy group that represents the interests of California wineries, the Canadian ban cost wine makers $357 million in 2025, with those losses continuing to add up this year.

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“Tariffs raise many input costs and also lower wine prices because retaliation causes retaliatory trade barriers. Canada used to be the top destination for California bottled wine, but that ended 20 months ago with the threats and talk about the 51st state,” Dan Sumner, an agricultural and resource economics professor at UC Davis who specializes in the economy of the wine business, told SFGATE via email.

The wine industry is in an unfamiliar ravine, he said in a follow-up call this week. He had to go back to Prohibition to draw parallels, noting that even then, it was somehow able to bounce back.

“Let’s be clear here — in the U.S., we went through a massive temperance movement that led to a Constitutional amendment,” he explained, “and the Great Depression wasn’t great in general, even though alcohol was made available for people again.”

Then he paused and acknowledged this moment for California wineries and grape growers. “This is a really bad one,” he continued. “It certainly is. And I will say, anyone [who] will say it’s at the end and it’s turned around isn’t speaking from data. We don’t have any real evidence. Data tends to lag what’s happening.”

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For other industry experts, the current state of affairs appears to be generationally driven. “We lived through a great time from 1993 through 2017 to 2018 where we saw wine grow faster than beer and spirits,” said Jon Maramarco, who is a managing partner for a company called bw166, a Colorado-based data collection and reporting firm for the alcohol industry. He said he’s specialized in the wine industry for most of his 35-year career. Wine’s explosive growth, he noted, began when baby boomers started to incorporate wine into their daily life in the 1990s. But they are now aging out of the market. “To be honest, we haven’t done enough to supplement core drinkers with subsequent generations,” he explained.

But it’s not just one demographic aging out of its prime drinking years that’s impacting the industry, he said. Changes in perception and patterns and the way people spend disposable income are also hitting the wine industry hard.

“A whole lot of things have changed in the environment. It’s far harder to replicate how people started to consume wine,” he said, using the decline of families sitting around the same table on weeknights as one example. “We used to joke, ‘How do you have wine with meatloaf on Tuesday?’ But now, you don’t see that family dinner near as much. Take youth sports and the demand that youth sports puts on family and time, running around to practice and teams, etc. It’s disrupted the traditional family dinner most weeknights, and that’s just one example.”

Another example of another industry impacting wine consumption is the mass availability of gambling apps and platforms: “You think of headwinds. Things we [didn’t] think about for younger consumers: online gambling. You look at the amount some young men spend on gambling — that’s money they would have spent instead of drinking at the bar.”

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The business, he said “is not dying, but unfortunately, it’s in a decline. How do we get people to strata to adopt patterns of more frequency?”

Others see changes in market driven ways, but less in the abstract and more with the actual infrastructure. San Luis Obispo County-based real estate agent David Crabtree has been selling ranches and wineries in and around Paso Robles since 1990. In the nearly four decades of doing business here, he’s seen the region go from “the place you stop for gas from the north or south to a destination for people coming from the north or south.”

“It transitioned from growing the grapes, to making the wine, and then you started to see some of the corporate players coming into the region,” Crabtree told SFGATE via phone this week. “There’ve been a tremendous amount of boutique wineries. Paso got some top scores worldwide. The food scene followed the wine scene. Entertainment, outdoor music, etc., kind of followed. That made it a destination. So that’s attracted a whole different demographic of buyers from when I started.”

As the region continued to explode in popularity in the 1990s through the pandemic, growers couldn’t make wine fast enough, Crabtree said. “Wine consumption, spirit consumption went through the roof,” he said of early COVID times. “Happy hour around the world started around 11 a.m.”

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But in the years that followed, things began to shift dramatically. Inflation and labor costs refused to ebb. Wine and overall alcohol sales decreased, especially for Gen Z, the next generation of drinkers.

“Gen Zers decided — they had a secret meeting somewhere — and [said] ‘We’re going to consume less wine.’ And not just wine but hard spirits. It kind of changed the dynamic,” Crabtree said with a chuckle. “So it was kind of like you got hit with an oversupply and underconsumption. People were basing long-term projections off historical numbers. They got hit.”

Crabtree acknowledged a handful of other winery closures that have befallen the region in the last few years.

The once enormously popular Chronic Cellars shut down its tasting room in Paso Robles this past April. E&J Gallo shut down its Courtside Cellars and laid off 47 workers in San Miguel last fall. And even the popular wine bar Region SLO (an offshoot of Region Sonoma), next to the ground floor of Hotel SLO, shut its doors for good in July.

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Crabtree is currently representing sellers in some large wine estate offerings. The biggest is Locatelli Vineyards and Winery. Located in San Miguel, the renowned family winery that has operated since 1996 “features 37.50± net vineyard acres producing premium varietals, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petite Syrah,” according to the listing. All 97 total acres can be yours right now for $5.5 million.

He is also representing a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom and 5,277-square-foot home with around 51 acres of cabernet sauvignon, petite sirah and sauvignon blanc grapes — which are contracted out to a local winery — with an additional 21 unplanted acres on the market right now for around $4.8 million.

In this, during a market dip that he admits is among the toughest he’s ever experienced, Crabtree sees opportunity: “I was talking to somebody about a different asset class earlier today. Any time you can buy something for less then it costs to produce it, it’s a good buy,” he explained. “It may not feel like it at the time, it is because it’s not sustainable. Right now, you can buy a winery for a vineyard for less than it costs to build it.”

Crabtree said if someone was to come in and buy an empty piece of property there and install wells, irrigation and root stock, it could cost about “$30-50K an acre.” Right now, existing producing vineyards are selling for about that amount, “which means the land is free,” he added.

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Industry expert Maramarco said he sees a silver lining in the way smaller and more boutique wineries are connecting with their customers, both old and new: “For smart operators, there’s ways to develop relationships with consumers, there are winners out there,” he said, noting that the constant engagement from people coming through the winery itself, along with a clever use of social media, is working. “... It’s not all technology. It’s not social media only. But some [have learned to] stay connected in ways that’s feasible and meaningful.”

Both Crabtree and wine industry professor Sumner also pointed out that money is still coming into the industry from both Los Angeles and the Silicon Valley, which they say is buoying the region and driving much of the next generation of wine business speculators right now. “There’s always small wineries owned by a dot-com millionaire,” Sumner said. “So they can afford to lose a million bucks. What they’ve really bought, I won’t call it a hobby, but some diversified place where they’ve invested some of their money.”

In the end, Sumner said he sees rays of hope.“We all try to invest in a long-term thing. That’s why people buy a house and hope to live in it for a very long time. That’s the way farmers and winemakers tend to be,” he concluded.

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