The tallies are in for how much winegrape growers in Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties made off their crops last year — and it’s a whopping $1.81 billion, or around 17 percent more than they made the year before, according to the annual “California Grape Crush Report” just released by the National Agricultural Statistics Service. The rising revenue is “largely thanks to the biggest local cabernet sauvignon crop ever picked,” the North Bay Business Journal reports, “and another high for what vintners are paying for those premium red grapes.” Lake County seems to be emerging as a serious player in the wine game, too — even surpassing Sonoma County in some categories. Here are some more crazy stats that the Journal pulled from the latest report for 2023, compared to the 2022 report: “Local county tonnages were 244,300 in Sonoma (up 22%), 168,800 in Napa (up 25%), 71,400 in Mendocino (up 15%) and 64,600 in Lake (up 41%). … Napa cab average pricing edged up 1.4% last year to a new high of $8,775 a ton, pushing the county’s wine grape crop value to $1.13 billion, passing the previous peak of $1.02 billion in 2018. New cabernet sauvignon acreage that has come into commercial production in the past three years swelled Lake County’s wine grape crop in 2023 to 64,600 tons, up nearly 40% from average. Lake’s cab crop jumped nearly 50% last year to almost 31,800 tons, and the county average price for the variety rose almost 6% to $2,356 a ton. Lake County has become known for sauvignon blanc over the years, and last year its tonnage for the trendy white grape jumped 28% to 20,000 tons, passing Sonoma County for the first time.” (Source: California Grape Crush Report & North Bay Business Journal; paywall)
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