Oenophiles on beer budgets have never had it better.
In California, which produces about 80% of US wine, some vintners stuck with more than people want to drink are offloading their surplus, much of it high quality. That means premium wines are increasingly within affordable reach on shelves at retailers including Costco, Kroger and Aldi.
A bottle that can command $150 as a winery brand may be going for less than $30 under a private or exclusive label, according to industry buyers. Those are wines bottled for retailers to sell under their own designations, such as Costco Wholesale Corp.’s Kirkland Signature.
At Kroger Co., the largest US grocer, the trajectory has been significant, and it’s showing up in wine ratings.
“We went from having no wines with 90-plus scores in our portfolio from respectable reviewers to 20 in the last two months,” said Curtis Mann, the company’s vice president of wine, beer and spirits.
Steve Beckner, direct import and private label wine buyer for Grocery Outlet Inc., said he has never encountered anything like it in his nearly 30 years in the business.
“I’m trying to find the words to describe it,” he said. “The quality has gone up exponentially.”
A Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon that Beckner said could fetch from $45 to $85 under a winemaker’s name is priced as low as $9.99 as a Second Cheapest Wine, the private label of the chain, which has more than 500 stores in 16 states.
The reason is a supply-demand mismatch that has been building as consumption has slowed. When he started at Grocery Outlet in 2018, Beckner said he fielded offers to buy in bulk for around 1,000 to 3,000 cases at a time. Now offers are for from 20,000 to 200,000 cases, he said.
Happily for consumers, this glut is far from over.
While the industry has taken “drastic, necessary actions” to fix the imbalance, “the residual overproduction from prior years still must be worked through,” Turrentine Brokerage wrote in its August 2026 wine market report.
“I would not want to be a grower right now,” said Taylor Case, president of Navigator Wine Collection, which buys from vineyards and sells under private labels including Gearbox, Motif and Decoded. “There’s a ton of wine that’s still on the market.”
Case said he recently tasted a Napa Valley cabernet that he knows retails for $149. Navigator will sell it for $29.99, he said. “I’m shocked at what we do sometimes.”
Wineries with too much product may unload their excess in what’s called a branded closeout or sell it in bulk to be bottled by others, including grocers and retailers like Total Wine & More. Wine with no takers may sit in storage, be blended into later releases or destroyed.
Private labels often don’t disclose the source. “If you’re a winery with a $100 cab and had to sell some of your wine that didn’t make it into the flagship, and that’s going into something that’s $9.99, you want to be discreet about it,” Beckner said.
A number of factors are cited for the overhang in California and other US wine regions, including people cutting down on alcohol, side effects of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and inflation.
Whatever the reason, this is “probably one of the best times I’ve seen in my near 30-year history in the industry for the consumer,” said Peter Baedeker, owner of Baedeker Wine, a Santa Barbara, California-based consulting firm.
Andrew Cullen, who runs a blog from Atlanta that reviews wines sold at Costco stores, said that “the quality has been going up and the price has been staying the same — or going down.”
One example: Costco said it recently lowered the price of its Kirkland Signature Stags Leap Cabernet Sauvignon to $19.99 from $22.99.
“You’re getting access to maybe some of the best winemakers in the world for 20 bucks a bottle,” Cullen said. “This is insane.”
The private-label appeal has its limits, according to Steph Marr, a director at an advertising tech company in Boston. While Marr is happy to go for a store brand for everyday drinking, the winemaker and story behind it matters when it comes to giving wine as a gift, she said. “I want it to feel like a special thing.”
But it’s in the private-label and exclusive-label space where demand is up, according to Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 State of the US Wine Industry report. “The one thing that is growing is private label” from retailers including Costco, Kroger and Aldi, said Rob McMillan, executive vice president of the bank’s wine division, in a videocast for the report. “Those kind of businesses, they’re all selling wine. They’re doing something right.”
And what some producers are doing, according to the report, “is a positive form of discounting that attracts new value-seeking consumers, protects existing brand value and helps drain the ocean of bulk wine.”
To speed up the supply correction, winemakers may rip out vineyards, replace grapes with other crops or simply make less wine.
Kerith Overstreet, founder of Bruliam Wines in Windsor, California, said she has deliberately produced less this year than in the past. Yields across the region fell recently due to volatile weather conditions, Overstreet said, and at Bruliam’s Russian River Valley vineyard, they’re down 30% from a 2024 high.
Lower yields are “a divine market correction,” she said. Fortunately, the wine business is “definitely cyclical.”
At Navigator, Case can see an end to the imbalance.
“It’s still going to take another 12 to 24 months to completely clear up,” he said. “Supply and demand always find each other.”
Lagrou writes for Bloomberg.
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