Red Ink Harvest
The Wine Economist column was provoked by a conversation with some California growers at this year’s Unified Wine & Grape Symposium and connected the dots linking their observations with Vinpro data presented a few weeks earlier for South Africa. Only 9 percent of South African winegrowers earn a sustainable return on their vineyard investment. A little more than half break even or earn small nominal profits, but not enough to sustain continuing investment. And almost 40 percent reported losses. And the margin gap is getting wider.
My California grower friends said their situation was not much different from the South Africans and, indeed, this is a problem I have seen around the world, although not typically backed by the sort of data that Vinpro collects for the South African industry.
The two simple strategies to claw back margins are to reduce yields to try to raise quality and therefore price or to reduce unit cost by increasing yields. South African growers have found it difficult to raise prices enough to make the first strategy work, so many are focusing on higher yields. But it is not as simple as that, the California growers told me, because sometimes buyers won’t allow higher yields and, in any case, some older vineyards just aren’t set up to make high yields possible.
Losing in Lodi
W. Blake Gray’s article digs deeper into the California situation, specifically for District 11, the San Joaquin Valley North, which includes Lodi. He quotes Aaron Lange of Lange Twins Family Winery and Vineyards in Lodi, for example, who explains that average grape prices are lower now than they were 25 years ago (despite higher costs throughout the production chain). Lodi Cabernet Sauvignon, for example, sold for an average of $695 per ton in 2022 according to the UDSA grape crush report. It sold for an average of $794 in 1997. The figures for Chardonnay grapes are $627 in 2022 versus $774 in 1997. That, my friends, is a big squeeze.
Is it possible to increase yields enough to break out of the big squeeze? Gray provides data from a 2021 UC/Davis study of the District 11 situation that suggests that higher yields can sometimes, but not always, solve the problem. At a price of $650 per ton (which is close to the average current Chardonnay and Cabernet prices), for example, the Davis study calculates a $156 per acre profit at 12 tons per ace and a $780 per acre product at a yield of 13 tons, but losses at lower per-acre yields.
The situation is only a little different at a price of $750 per ton. Profits ($633 per acre) appear at a yield of 11 tons per acre, rising to $2080 at a yield of 13 tons. But yields below 11 tons per acre still generate red ink even with the higher price.
Lower prices make things much worse. At a price of $550 per ton, no level of yield between 7 tons and 13 tons generates a profit. It’s red ink all the way down.
Unsustainable Yields
These data and reports make me wonder if winegrape growing is economically sustainable for many producers in District 11 and similar regions and these doubts are heightened by Gray’s interview with Jeff Bitter, the President of Allied Grape Growers (and a grower himself). Bitter notes that the economics of winegrape growing have made it difficult or impossible to focus solely on grape production.
Why continue to farm grapes? Some farm winegrapes because it is what they want to do (a “lifestyle” choice), Bitter suggests at one point, or because the alternatives are unattractive. There are a lot of factors that define the situation, including market conditions in different regions (Central Valley, Central Coast, North Coast) and farm size. There is money to be made in winegrapes under the right circumstances, but there are plenty of losses, too, and it is easy to understand why generational transitiions among growers are often in doubt.
When we talk about sustainable winegrowing, we usually focus on the environmental impacts, but Gray’s article suggests that we need to take the issue of economic sustainably more seriously, too.
Thanks to Wine Business Monthly for all the great articles in this issue and to W. Blake Gray for his focused report on the vineyard margin problem and the economic issues facing growers generally.