Oenophiles on beer budgets have never had it better.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u2019s Kirkland Signature. <\/p>\n
At Kroger Co., the largest US grocer, the trajectory has been significant, and it\u2019s showing up in wine ratings.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went from having no wines with 90-plus scores in our portfolio from respectable reviewers to 20 in the last two months,\u201d said Curtis Mann, the company\u2019s vice president of wine, beer and spirits. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m trying to find the words to describe it,\u201d he said. \u201cThe quality has gone up exponentially.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon that Beckner said could fetch from $45 to $85 under a winemaker\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Happily for consumers, this glut is far from over.<\/p>\n
While the industry has taken \u201cdrastic, necessary actions\u201d to fix the imbalance, \u201cthe residual overproduction from prior years still must be worked through,\u201d Turrentine Brokerage wrote in its August 2026 wine market report.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would not want to be a grower right now,\u201d said Taylor Case, president of Navigator Wine Collection, which buys from vineyards and sells under private labels including Gearbox, Motif and Decoded. \u201cThere\u2019s a ton of wine that\u2019s still on the market.\u201d<\/p>\n
Case said he recently tasted a Napa Valley cabernet that he knows retails for $149. Navigator will sell it for $29.99, he said. \u201cI\u2019m shocked at what we do sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wineries with too much product may unload their excess in what\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
Private labels often don\u2019t disclose the source. \u201cIf you\u2019re a winery with a $100 cab and had to sell some of your wine that didn\u2019t make it into the flagship, and that\u2019s going into something that\u2019s $9.99, you want to be discreet about it,\u201d Beckner said. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Whatever the reason, this is \u201cprobably one of the best times I\u2019ve seen in my near 30-year history in the industry for the consumer,\u201d said Peter Baedeker, owner of Baedeker Wine, a Santa Barbara, California-based consulting firm. <\/p>\n
Andrew Cullen, who runs a blog from Atlanta that reviews wines sold at Costco stores, said that \u201cthe quality has been going up and the price has been staying the same \u2014 or going down.\u201d<\/p>\n
One example: Costco said it recently lowered the price of its Kirkland Signature Stags Leap Cabernet Sauvignon to $19.99 from $22.99.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re getting access to maybe some of the best winemakers in the world for 20 bucks a bottle,\u201d Cullen said. \u201cThis is insane.\u201d <\/p>\n
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. \u201cI want it to feel like a special thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s in the private-label and exclusive-label space where demand is up, according to Silicon Valley Bank\u2019s 2026 State of the US Wine Industry report. \u201cThe one thing that is growing is private label\u201d from retailers including Costco, Kroger and Aldi, said Rob McMillan, executive vice president of the bank\u2019s wine division, in a videocast for the report. \u201cThose kind of businesses, they\u2019re all selling wine. They\u2019re doing something right.\u201d<\/p>\n
And what some producers are doing, according to the report, \u201cis a positive form of discounting that attracts new value-seeking consumers, protects existing brand value and helps drain the ocean of bulk wine.\u201d<\/p>\n
To speed up the supply correction, winemakers may rip out vineyards, replace grapes with other crops or simply make less wine. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s Russian River Valley vineyard, they\u2019re down 30% from a 2024 high.<\/p>\n
Lower yields are \u201ca divine market correction,\u201d she said. Fortunately, the wine business is \u201cdefinitely cyclical.\u201d <\/p>\n
At Navigator, Case can see an end to the imbalance. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s still going to take another 12 to 24 months to completely clear up,\u201d he said. \u201cSupply and demand always find each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lagrou writes for Bloomberg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45878,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2966,35774,25613,58,57,11927,5867,2310,35772,35771,7690,35773,2921,92,12979,126],"class_list":["post-45877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-aldi","tag-bargain-price","tag-bulk","tag-california","tag-california-wine","tag-case","tag-costco","tag-kroger","tag-premium-bottle","tag-private-label-wine-buyer","tag-retailer","tag-steve-beckner","tag-vice-president","tag-wine","tag-winemaker","tag-year"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@dc\/117400232677737336","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}