California's wine glut means $150 bottles are hiding behind $30 private labels — here's how to find them - Dining and Cooking

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It can be difficult to know whether or not a glass of wine is good when you’re drinking it. Even the experts can struggle. And that’s why so many wine drinkers turn to the price tag to tell them.

But before you reach for the most expensive bottle on the shelf, you may want to consider whether a much cheaper bottle might be just as good.

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That’s because California vineyards have been growing way too many grapes compared to the amount of wine that people are actually buying, according to reporting from Bloomberg. The U.S. sold just 329.2 million cases in 2025, down from 335.9 million cases in 2024, according to industry reports.

That’s why they’re being winemakers are selling to supermarkets at a much lower pricetag that gets passed down to customers. Grocery Outlet Inc., a discount grocery store, could usually acquire up to 3,000 cases at a time back in 2018. Now, however, it receives offers for as many as 200,000 cases that get resold at a steep discount.

Navigator Wine Collection, a company that makes private-label wines for retailers, has pointed to a Napa Cabernet with a $149 retail price that it plans to sell at $29.99, for example. (Although, it’s worth noting that the “$149 retail price” refers to the winery’s list price, not necessarily what the wine would actually sell for.)

Nonetheless, there’s a catch: You won’t find these high-end wines with premium labels. You’ll need to look more closely to find these deals.

Why it’s so hard to identify great wine

All the cheap, abundant, high-quality wine in the world doesn’t mean much if you don’t know how to find it.

How it usually goes is that, once you’ve settled on which type of wine you feel like having, you look at all the options available within that category — say, all the bottles of Chardonnay.

Your grocery store wine aisle probably has a huge selection of wine in any or all categories. After all, many grocery stores have ramped up their selections of wine in recent years.

Kroger, for example, announced in July 2026 that it was importing more than 130 luxury wines to give shoppers even more variety, including wines from Italy and France. Its expanded wine selections will be available at 147 locations.

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That means that, when you go to pick out that bottle of Chardonnay, you might be faced with dozens of options at a multitude of prices.

That’s a challenging situation if your goal is to make sure you get the best bottle you can. You might see if you recognize a brand name, or you might just end up just deciding how much you want to spend and picking whatever’s closest to that number.

Right now, though, you might be better off simply picking up the private-label wine at your local grocery store.

Private labels, which you might know by the term “store brands,” include names like Kirkland Signature at Costco. They compete with name-brand goods. They’re usually cheaper, and they’re sometimes just as good, if not better. In some cases, they’re made by the same manufacturer as the name-brand product.

If you buy Kirkland Signature batteries, for example, those are manufactured by Duracell, according to former CEO Craig Jelinek.

Many private-label wines from grocery stores like Trader Joe’s, Kroger, Target, and Sam’s Club come from California, where the surplus in production is largely happening. Many private-label wines are the exact same wine you’d find in a more expensive bottle.

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How to find the best private-label wine

It’s often in your grocery store’s best interest to not tell you where a particular private-label good was made, especially if it came from the exact same manufacturer as a more expensive product they sell.

With rising grocery prices, it’s worth knowing that many products — like milk, butter and certain cleaning products — have the potential to be more or less identical, no matter which version you get.

It’s worth doing some research into your grocery store to find out which products are secretly the same. Walmart and Aldi, for example, both have documented details about where certain products come from.

While there’s no way to guarantee that a particular bottle of wine is secretly higher quality than it looks, keep in mind that the surplus is in California right now.

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau regulates wine labels, which means that you can check for a wine that comes from a California vineyard. So, for example, if you’re shopping at Kroger, Simple Truth wine has Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon from California.

Meanwhile, Grocery Outlet launched a private label called Second Cheapest Wine in 2025. Several of its bottles come from Napa Valley or Sonoma County.