Piles of burnt and mangled iron rods and grapevines can be seen in piles after being removed from a property along Alta Mesa Road in Lodi, California. The region sells much of its grape supply to large wine companies and has been hit hard by the yearslong grape surplus.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
California winegrowers uprooted even more vineyards this year than last — more than 47,000 acres of vines between August 1, 2025 and August 1, 2026, according to the 2026 Standing Winegrape Acreage report. It still might not be enough to counteract the seismic effects of the ongoing wine industry crisis.
Wine sales have plummeted alongside the United States’ overall rate of alcohol consumption, which has spent two straight years at a historic low. Left with a years-long grape surplus that’s forced growers to spend money farming grapes that they can’t sell, many see vine removal as their only financial option.
The Standing Winegrape Acreage report, which is commissioned by the California Association of Winegrape Growers, indicates that nearly 10% of California’s total vineyard land — which stands at about 439,115 acres, as of August — was stripped of vines over the past year.
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More and more vines have met this fate: The California Association of Winegrape Growers recorded about 9,000 more vineyard acres removed this year than in the year before, when over 38,000 acres were removed. (Last year’s report also covered a slightly shorter window, running from October 1, 2024 to August 1, 2025.)
The increase did not come as a surprise to Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, a cooperative representing about 400 California growers.
“We’ve been saying all along that we were going to see more vines come out of the ground between the ‘25 and ‘26 harvest than we did in prior years,” Bitter told the Chronicle. “That it was going to reach a peak, in other words, of removals.”
Even if this year marks the peak of vine removal, that doesn’t mean California growers are done pulling vines up, according to Bitter. “We’re on track to continue, and quite honestly, it’s going to be significant again this winter,” he said. Although Bitter does not expect that the number of removals will exceed this year’s, he stressed that the industry was still “out of balance overall with supply and demand.”
That imbalance can be partly attributed to the abundance of wine in storage across the state. Grape broker Turrentine Brokerage estimates that there are roughly 28 million gallons of bulk wine available for purchase in California — only about 15 to 17 million gallons of which are likely to sell. The excess could end up mixed into later vintages or disposed of, the grape broker said.
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The surplus serves as a thumb on the supply and demand scale — with so much wine in storage, the industry is less dependent on new grape crops, depressing the price of grapes. Bitter estimated that California has about 400,000 acres of actively productive vineyards left, since the California Association of Winegrape Growers estimate includes abandoned and newly planted vineyards.
Earlier this month, Spring Mountain Vineyard CEO Peter Ekman suggested that growers have already cleared enough vineyards to bring the market back to equilibrium — and warned that further removals could put the state at risk of a grape shortage. Bitter dismissed shortage concerns during a California Association of Winegrape Growers news conference last week. “If we go too far on pullouts,” he said, the depleted grape supply will be “backfilled with imports,” giving growers time to adjust to the change in demand.
The California Association of Winegrape Growers did not immediately release county-by-county estimates for where the most vines have been removed. The region that has generally been hit hardest is Lodi (San Joaquin County), which sells much of its grape supply to large wine companies. Ben Kolber, who owns Lodi’s KG Vineyard Management, said during last week’s news conference that vineyard removal and abandonment were the region’s “biggest struggle.” Lodi is now heading into its third consecutive year of substantial vineyard removals, he said.
“I see a lot of vineyards prepping to be removed — we’re seeing endposts coming out of the ground, and equipment lining up to remove them,” Kolber said, noting that many of those fields would be replanted with almonds or olives. “You won’t see those vineyards come back. … The cost of developing a vineyard is just too expensive, especially for our region and the price point we grow for.”
The Standing Winegrape Acreage report does not account for the many vineyards that have been left idle or abandoned in recent years. John Azevedo, senior vice president of farming at Santa Rosa’s Jackson Family Wines said many Sonoma growers have taken this route as a result of the county’s strict permitting requirements around vineyard removal. “There were quite a few acres that were never farmed to be harvested in Sonoma,” Azevedo said during the news conference. “Some of those have come out over the course of the year; some of those are just kind of sitting there.”
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The report’s findings come as many growers face a high-stakes decision about their vineyards — whether to hold out for a turnaround that could leave them without an adequate supply of grapes, or to continue pulling up vines amid an industry-wide crisis that doesn’t yet appear to have hit bottom.
“The findings put numbers to changes growers are experiencing firsthand, and behind those numbers are difficult decisions affecting families, employees and local businesses,” California Association of Winegrowers President Natalie Collins said in a Friday statement. “Acreage is adjusting to a difficult market, but as we work to rebuild demand for California wine, we have to make sure the growers at its foundation are still farming when that demand returns.”
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