The Vines That Thrive

A recent New York Times feature (“Sales are So Slow, California Wineries Are Burning their Vineyards”) painted a vivid portrait of California wine country in decline: bulldozers in the Santa Lucia Highlands, burning vineyards, a grower watching family history go up in flames. It's powerful journalism. It's also dramatic, and not the full story. Dare I say clickbait?

The numbers are real, and as someone who has farmed a vineyard for years, I take them seriously. Wine grape growers pulled roughly 38,000 acres of vines last year, about 7 percent of California's total plantings. An estimated half a million tons of grapes went unpicked. U.S. wine volume slipped to its lowest point in twenty years. Export markets took a hit too: Canadian provinces pulled American wine from government shelves in 2025, in retaliation for U.S. tariffs.

For an industry already reeling from a post-pandemic sales decline, to then be lumped in with hard liquor in the nation's revised health conversation was a gut punch. The bad press, in my view, is an incomplete picture. The Blue Zones, some of the most studied populations for human longevity, from Sardinia and other idyllic European locations, show moderate wine, enjoyed with food, family, and friends, as a consistent thread among the longest-lived people on earth. Correlation isn't proof, and moderation is the entire point, but it's a meaningfully different story than the one being told about alcohol broadly.

For the farmers living through the current downturn, the loss is real. But an oversupply correction is not an industry collapse, and torched vineyards owned by a large grower don't describe what's happening at many small, owner-operated estates that never overplanted to begin with. Being an optimist, I'd say it doesn't describe the opportunity now opening up for producers like us, either.

A familiar cycle

Grapes are a cyclical crop. California's vineyard acreage nearly doubled in the decades leading up to the mid 2010s, much of it speculative, as row crop land and orchards were converted to vines on the belief that Pinot Noir, riding the wave of the movie Sideways, would sell itself forever. Large, conventionally farmed vineyards, often reliant on Roundup and other toxic herbicides and planted for volume rather than for a specific bottle or customer, make up much of the acreage now being removed.

This is not new. The wine industry has moved through boom and correction cycles for a century, through Prohibition's aftermath, the 1970s production boom, the Great Recession downturn, and countless varietal fads. The state's vineyard acreage actually peaked around 2018 and 2019, near 590,000 bearing acres, the tail end of that most recent speculative run. Then the pandemic hit, and consumption spiked in 2020 and 2021 just as the state's planting base sat at its historic high. Everyone was drinking. A lot... and making homemade bread. Wine consumption then corrected sharply. Taxable removals, the volume of wine actually entering the U.S. market, peaked at 743 million gallons in 2020 and fell to 554 million gallons by 2025, a 25 percent decline in five years and the lowest level in over a decade of federal tracking. National wine volume fell 3.3 percent in 2024 alone, and industry trackers estimate 2025 closed down nearly 5 percent, the sharpest annual decline the category has seen since the pandemic began. That mismatch, demand surging onto an already oversupplied vineyard footprint and then reversing hard, explains much of why today's correction is so large. What's unusual isn't that vines are coming out. It's how much attention this cycle is getting.

Vine removal is routine, not exceptional

Vineyards are typically productive for thirty to fifty years before yields decline enough to warrant replanting, and many large growers yank and replant vineyards younger than thirty years old. The process has always looked the same: bulldoze the vines into piles, then burn them. This isn't a new practice born of a downturn. It's how vineyards have been retired for generations.

I removed about seven acres of underperforming Cabernet Sauvignon from our estate in 2012 this exact way. Those vines were forty to sixty years old, twisted Saint George rootstock, well past their prime, and it was still a painful decision. There's something both brutal and beautiful about the process. I remember the tractor's blade cutting through those old roots as cleanly as a knife through butter, and the piles themselves, assembled at careful angles, looking almost sculptural before I finally agreed we'd torch them. Ashes to ashes. The ash gets worked back into the soil, a small return on decades of growth. I let the ground rest through a seven-year fallow period, regenerated the soil with compost, minerals, and beautiful cover crops. I then replanted, bringing back some of that acreage in Cabernet Sauvignon alongside Chardonnay. Like many removals, ours ended in new vines going into the ground.

That pattern holds across all wine regions, and it's especially visible close to home. Sonoma County saw about 2,700 acres removed between October 2024 and August 2025. About 3,100 acres came out of Napa's roughly 43,000 total over that same period, and an estimated 8,000 acres, 20 percent of the county's plantings, went unharvested in 2025. Sangiacomo Family Vineyards, farming Sonoma Valley for nearly a century, replaces roughly 50 acres of older vines every year as a matter of routine, across their 1,500 acres of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Spring Mountain Vineyard in St. Helena, first planted in 1872, is now in the midst of a multi-year replant after fire damage and vines nearing the natural end of their life anyway. Estates replant like this because they are planning for the next fifty years, not because the industry is dying. That is what responsible vineyard management has always looked like, done annually regardless of the market.

This is not a California-only story. Oregon's 2025 winegrape production fell 25 percent from the year before, and harvested acreage dropped 12 percent, to just over 34,500 acres. Washington tells a similar story with its own twist: the state's 2025 harvest fell to its lowest tonnage since at least 2011, down roughly 43 percent, in a year growers called one of the best growing seasons in memory. That gap between good farming and weak demand is the clearest evidence yet that this correction is structural.

All of this reinforces the cyclical argument. Large producers built for demand that no longer exists are absorbing most of the pain. Small, estate-driven wineries with direct customer relationships remain best positioned to hold steady and grow.

A word on varietals

Replanting is a chance to rewrite what is grown. Gray Riesling, technically Trousseau Gris, once filled field blends statewide; today it survives in a handful of vineyards. Some growers are transitioning to olives, citrus, stone fruit, even agave for ambitious tequila projects, mostly without a reporter present. California still had roughly 477,000 acres of wine grapes standing at last count, and the estates selling directly under their own label remain the segment least exposed to this correction.

Cabernet Sauvignon is still king, and Pinot Noir holds a close second, no small feat for such a temperamental grape. Anyone who saw the movie Sideways remembers Miles's rapturous monologue on what makes Pinot special, a scene credited with sparking the boom that followed. Growers are now experimenting with Fiano, Grenache Blanc, and other lesser-known varieties suited to a warming climate. Watching a category reinvent itself never gets old.

Merlot deserves a word too. Its post-Sideways stigma was unfair, and it's finally fading. Merlot is a timeless piece of classic Bordeaux blends and, produced with care, a wine of real depth and silky structure on its own. Its comeback is proof that fashion and quality were never the same thing.

Where boutique producers are well positioned, and why wine lovers should take notice

Mass market labels are largely the ones carrying unsold inventory built for a demand curve that, at least momentarily, doesn't exist. Most small estate wineries were never built for that curve, and this correction is becoming their moment. At Coplan Vineyards, we produce under 500 cases a year: estate Chardonnay grown here in Sonoma Carneros, known as Chardonnay country, and estate Cabernet Sauvignon, including a block of historic Saint George rootstock vines listed on the historic registry. This spring, that work earned us the cover of American Vineyard Magazine, a nice validation of the idea that small, deliberate farming still has a story worth telling. We know our vineyards row by row. Farming is done by hand, organically, for our own label, not for a disinterested buyer. We don't distribute through a large network; most of our wine goes directly to the people who drink it, and our winemaker tastes every lot before it goes into barrels we hand-select. While mass-produced, overextended wine works through its surplus, I believe it's estates like ours, built on restraint rather than volume, that are best positioned to hold steady and grow through the correction.

This, I'd argue, is the real opportunity hiding inside a difficult news cycle. Wine lovers tired of labels that could have come from anywhere have more reason than ever to seek out small, organic, estate-grown producers, the ones who answer their own phones and farm their own land. That shift in attention isn't a consolation prize for a shrinking industry. It's where the industry's future actually lives.

Who actually carries the risk

There's another part of this story the Times piece doesn’t address: grape growers sit at the bottom of the wine supply chain and carry nearly all the risk. Most grower contracts pay by tons delivered, not a fixed rate per acre, so a farmer's income depends on what nature allows the vines to produce. Many contracts also include provisions allowing buyers to reject fruit due to sugar levels, smoke exposure, chemistry panels, or no reason at all.  Frost during bud break, a hailstorm during the flowering stage, smoke taint from a wildfire 150 miles away two weeks before harvest- any of it can wipe out a season's income, and the farmer mostly bears that loss alone. Mother Nature does not negotiate, and it’s a double doozie when you’re relying on a buyer who backs out of the deal. I’ve seen all of this.

That risk structure explains the different ways wine gets made, at different price points, with very different relationships to authenticity. Estate-grown wine, such as at Coplan Vineyards and other, mostly smaller producers, is made from fruit a winery farms itself. It is the most expensive to produce because the winery absorbs every agricultural risk directly, on vineyards of a smaller scale. The resulting wine is the most authentic expression of a place, since the people making the wine watched the vines through the season. Most conventional producers instead buy fruit from independent growers, shifting the farming risk to the farmer while still requiring real winemaking. The least expensive path, and the one that supplies most large distribution networks, is buying bulk juice on the open market and blending it into a finished product, skipping both the farming risk and much of the winemaking itself. That's a big business model. It's also about as far from artisan as the category gets. 100% opposite the philosophy and process that I so passionately employ.

What consumers are actually asking for

Data on younger drinkers shifting toward canned cocktails and sobriety is real, and so is data on aging boomers drinking less. But look at what both groups reward within the category: story, provenance, care, a producer they can name. A twenty-six-year-old choosing one exceptional bottle over four forgettable ones, and a sixty-year-old collector who's followed a small estate for years, are responding to the same thing. Neither wants a wine that could have come from anywhere. Both aspire to know whose hands were on the fruit. Consumers want authenticity, and boutique producers are, by definition, built to deliver it.

The work now is patience and customer experiences

Grape farming asks its stewards to think in years, not quarters. The vines coming out today were largely planted for a market that peaked and passed. What gets planted next, tended thoughtfully from the start, is exactly what a smaller, more discerning market is asking for. This cycle has turned before, and it will settle the way it always has. Boutique, estate-grown, story-driven wine is not the casualty of this correction. It's what the correction is moving the market toward.

Coplan Vineyards is one of these small estates: farmed with purpose, character, and the kind of authenticity that only comes from growing what you bottle. We’re heavily involved with our community. We're not alone. Across Sonoma, Napa, Oregon, Washington, and beyond, many smaller producers are doing the same, farming their own ground, making wine in small lots, building something meant to be discovered rather than mass-distributed. If you want a wine you can actually connect with, and want to support the people still willing to do this work by hand, go looking for them. These aren't always the easiest bottles to find. That's precisely the point, and it's exactly the opportunity in front of us.

If this resonates, I'd love for you to taste what we're doing here in Sonoma. Our current releases, the estate-grown 2024 Owl’s Peak Chardonnay and the 2023 Life of the Party Red Blend, are exactly the kind of small-lot, hand-farmed wine this piece has been about.

For the stories behind the wine, the releases before anyone else hears about them, and an invitation into our small, growing wine club, join our mailing list and follow along at the vineyard day-to-day on Instagram @coplan_vineyards.

Sources

1.     Soumya Karlamangla, "Sales Are So Low, California Wineries Are Burning Their Vineyards," The New York Times, July 30, 2026

2.     Press Democrat, "Sonoma County winegrowers struggle with unsold grapes as vines are pulled statewide," Nov. 10, 2025; California Farm Bureau AgAlert, "Report maps impact of wine downturn on grape acreage," Nov. 19, 2025

3.     Silicon Valley Bank, State of the U.S. Wine Industry 2026 report, as reported by Yahoo Finance

4.     CBC News, "How much damage have Canada's booze bans done to the U.S. wine industry?" May 2026; Wine Enthusiast, "Tariff Boycotts Are Hurting American Wineries," March 2026

5.     Blue Zones, "Sardinia, Italy" research summary

6.     SevenFifty Daily, "The Plight of California's Grape Growers," May 5, 2025

7.     American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, "Vine Age Affects Vine Performance, Grape and Wine Chemical and Sensory Composition of cv. Zinfandel from California," 2022

8.     Press Democrat, same Nov. 10, 2025 article as above (Sonoma acreage and Sangiacomo Family Vineyards detail)

9.     Napa County Times, "Napa Valley grapes were left on the vine this harvest," Nov. 21, 2025

10.  Wine Industry Advisor, "Spring Mountain Vineyard Kicks off Phase 2 of Historic Replanting Six Weeks Early," March 2026

11.  Oregon Wine Board, 2025 Vineyard and Winery Census Report, as covered by The Bulletin and Capital Press, July 2026

12.  Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business, "Wine industry adjusts to declining production, softer demand," June 2026

13.  Wikipedia, "Trousseau gris"

14.  San Francisco Examiner, "Sales are so low, California wineries are burning their vineyards," and GV Wire, "Why Are California Wineries Burning Their Vineyards?" both July 2026

15.  TTB federal production and removals data, as compiled and reported by BestWineImporters, "US Wine Market Report 2025 to 2026," 2026

16.  Nathan Greene, S&D Insights, as reported in Beverage Industry, "2026 State of the Beverage Industry: Preference shifts impact spirits, wine markets," February 2026

17. San Francisco Examiner, "Sales are so low, California wineries are burning their vineyards," and GV Wire, "Why Are California Wineries Burning Their Vineyards?" both July 2026