For news readers, there has been a steady drip of wine industry reportage as sour as last week’s wine. 

It’s been five years of vineyard sales, declining real estate values, consolidations, the retirement of leading figures, layoffs, bankruptcies, closures and unsold grapes, rotting on the vine.

The 45 years that followed 1976’s “Judgment of Paris,” which declared Napa wine superior to French, had been a triumphal progression of growth, expansion and inebriated confidence for Sonoma County vintners. And Sonoma’s landscape changed out of all recognition. But it seems, at last, the party is over. 

Sonoma’s wine industry, coming off a pandemic-era sales bump, is entering its fifth year of steady decline. The Wine Country hangover has begun.

For those tempted to grin at an over-proud industry’s humbling, this news affects everyone and everything here. With besotted civic leaders acting as cheerleaders, Sonoma County went all-in on its wine bet.

Commonly reckoned to be large, the wine industry is in fact gigantic. At its 2018 peak, 435 wineries with a combined 60,000 acres under cultivation accounted for roughly $8 billion of Sonoma County’s $30 billion GDP—the sum value of all our work and wages. Add an additional $1.2 billion for wine tourism and associated jobs, and the extended industry approached, as of 2018, a one-third share of our economy and one quarter (54,000) of our full-time jobs (according to Sonoma County Vintners, sonomawine.com). 

Sonoma County is as close to a one-industry monoculture as one is likely to find outside of an economics textbook. Consider how closely local construction, real estate, restaurants, landscaping, event planning, nonprofits and, ahem, local media are allied to local wine, and it is clear how integrated the one third is to the other two. We are all second- and third-order employees of the wine industry.

Decline & Fall

Now that we know decreased wine sales mean unbooked musicians, empty salons, unpaid invoices and cancelled nonprofit sponsorships from Sonoma Valley to the coast, here are the numbers in wine.

The Grapes. 2018 was the year Sonoma County’s wine industry peaked (USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service). That year, 275,977 tons of grapes were crushed. Then the slide began. In 2025, the crush had slumped to 185,500 tons (USDA/NASS Preliminary Grape Crush Report, 2026), a decline of nearly a third from the peak.

The value of the harvest fell with it: from $777 million in 2018 (Sonoma County Crop Report, 2018) to an estimated $523 million in 2025, a decline of roughly a third in dollar terms as well.

And still we are in a state of oversupply. Karissa Kruse, president of Sonoma County Winegrowers, estimated roughly 30% of local grapes went unsold in 2025 (Press Democrat, November 2025).

The Acreage. Growers have responded by pulling out vines: Approximately 2,700 acres, or roughly 5% of the county’s planted vineyard, came out between October 2024 and August 2025 (California Association of Winegrape Growers/Land IQ, 2025 Standing Winegrape Acreage Report), a deliberate reduction in supply intended to help stabilize price per ton.

These are the only field-verified acreage figures that exist for Sonoma County; the growers association had never before commissioned mapping precise enough to measure county-level change. It is one of several gaps in the data on the county’s largest industry.

The Real Estate. Vineyard land values vary widely across the county’s 19 appellations, but it is now plainly a buyer’s market, “like catching a falling knife,” as one appraiser told the Press Democrat in May.

The Employment. The most significant statistical gap in this story is employment. No reliable current figures exist. Employment is difficult to assess because contraction rarely produces a layoff. Existing employees simply see their hours cut; seasonal workers are simply not rehired the following season.

A straight-line computation from a harvest reduced in volume and value by roughly a third would suggest a comparable reduction in hours and wages across the 2025 season. And the true number could be higher, since unharvested fruit eliminates labor entirely rather than merely reducing it.

In my own interviews with undocumented farmworkers (see “ICE and American Democracy” at bohemian.com), one contact told me that farmworkers are more frightened by sustained unemployment than by the threat of ICE seizure.

The Institutions. The downturn is visible in the industry’s own trade infrastructure. Michael Haney resigned as president of Sonoma County Vintners in July 2025, after nearly 11 years.

In November, the organization depended on voluntary contributions from the 250 wineries it represents and laid off four senior staff.

What followed was announced as a merger made from a position of strength: Sonoma County Vintners’ absorption by Sonoma County Winegrowers into a single new organization, Sonoma County Wine, will become effective January 2027. The plainer reading is lost revenue and lost function.

It promises to speak with “one unmistakable voice” for Sonoma County wine. A strong, unified voice and strong collective action will genuinely be required if the industry is to navigate this crisis. Absent that, what remains is a free-for-all: individual wineries trying things, fending for themselves, with no one speaking, or acting, for the whole. To date, the new organization has done little beyond try to put a brave face on the situation.

Causes

The person who opened my eyes to the magnitude of this industry and the severity of its losses is Dr. Damien Wilson, one of the county’s leading institutional minds on wine.

An Australian and a numbers-driven researcher with more than a hundred publications to his name, Wilson brings three very different wine markets to bear on the question: Australia, Burgundy and now California. He arrived at Sonoma State in 2015 from the Burgundy School of Business in Dijon, watched our industry peak in 2018 and has watched it decline ever since.

His position is funded in part by the industry itself and is at once semi-independent and prescriptive: to advise, statistically and experimentally, on how best to grow and now on how best to survive a violent contraction.

He is, by his own admission, an unpopular Cassandra at industry parties, the price of insisting that wine attend to numbers rather than tradition and that the industry change.

I found him dapper, affable, unmistakably academic at his leafy offices in the Wine Spectator building, and asked what lies behind the decline.

He began, characteristically, with a number: 80% of American wine is consumed domestically, so both the problem and its likely solutions are domestic, not international.

From there, a generational shift on two axes at once: how much alcohol Americans consume, and which kind. Younger generations drink less, and when they drink, they drink less wine.

Put more bluntly, in Wilson’s own arithmetic: Baby boomers who drink wine are dying. Gen Xers still drink wine, by and large. Millennials drink less, and have shifted in favor of craft beer and craft cocktail trends that developed with that generation. Gen Z is the demographic cliff.

A further factor affects each generation in rough proportion to its digital exposure. Compared with the endless, dressed-up variety of craft cocktails, or the dynamic, ever-changing brightly colored labels of craft beer, wine, he argued, is simply less photogenic. Its appearance on social media barely changes between a $10 bottle and a $100 one.

There is a second, related effect. Digital devices condition consumers to decide fast, on little information, and wine, Wilson argues, has done the opposite of adapting to that: It has overcomplicated itself, wrapping the product in a connoisseurship most young drinkers have neither the time nor the patience to learn.

A final generational factor, I will add with some bitterness, is simply wealth. Each successive generation has favored less expensive forms of alcohol because each successive American generation has been poorer than the one before it.

Desperate Times

When I asked Wilson how the industry could reach younger consumers, his answer came down to two words: affordable and simple. Basically the opposite direction wine has been moving in for 40 years.

“Affordable,” he was careful to specify, not through discounting, but through efficiencies. His clearest example is modeled on practices in other international wine regions: Within an appellation, producers would sell excess fruit through a regional cooperative that blends it into a single wine reflective of the region as a whole. Economies of scale would make it inexpensive, widely available and consistently less per bottle as well as an entry point into our region.

Second, for an individual winery: Partly or wholly dismantle the vintage system which currently forces complex inventory, shifting product and variable pricing for what could be a single blended offering, stable across years.

Third, in the tasting room itself: Acquiring the habit of wine takes repeated exposure and positive reinforcement, which means retraining how staff actually talk to people. As Wilson suggests, “Learn the language the consumer is using, be responsive to what brought them in and don’t lead the conversation.” Ask questions first. Find out why they walked in. Pedantry is the fastest way to make a newcomer feel excluded, or simply stupid.

These are radical changes, but Wilson believes there is finally an appetite for them: “People are literally walking away from their [unsalable] wineries,” he pointed out. He is dubious, notably, of government intervention as a fix, and equally dubious of repositioning Sonoma’s wine toward international export.

One of the more genuinely surprising things Wilson told me: The entire world market for wine has been in decline since the 1980s, fluctuating downward to roughly the level it was at in 1960. Sonoma and Napa’s 30-year boom, in other words, played out entirely inside a general decline in world wine consumption, even as new producing regions like Chile, Australia, Germany and others followed California’s lead after the Judgment of Paris and emerged as global export brands in their own right, entering the competition for an already shrinking market.

Wilson is a participant, not a spectator, in his own prescriptions: With his own money, he is producing a wine travelogue with himself as host, which he hopes to sell to a streamer. Its message to a younger audience: “Keep the magic. Lose the mystification.”

Where’s the Bottom?

The most optimistic prediction holds that the decline will end in 2028. This is per an influential report from Rob McMillan, founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s wine division, now part of First Citizens Bank (State of the U.S. Wine Industry Report, 2026).

That is two more years of decline for the engine of Sonoma’s economy but an end to the slide, and perhaps one arriving without the radical changes Wilson argues a complacent industry needs. If the prediction is correct, Sonoma wine emerges significantly smaller in a new, permanent normal rather than a low point on the way back up.

To put figures to it: Sonoma County could emerge in 2028 with roughly 50,000 acres under vine, down from a peak above 60,000 producing a crop worth somewhere near $410 million against $777 million in 2018. The wider wine economy, retail and tourism together, would shrink by something like $2.3 billion, or nearly 8% of everything the county produces. Twelve thousand jobs’ worth of work would be gone not as firings, but as billings never sent.

These figures are my own back-of-the-envelope calculations, extrapolated from existing downward trends. No agency, university or trade group has published any projection of what Sonoma County’s defining industry will look like on the other side of its worst decade since Prohibition.

In raw numbers, the industry would sit roughly where it stood in 2005. This is not a return to the past in any meaningful sense. The 2005 industry was growing, capitalized and confident, with land values rising and buyers competing. The 2028 industry would be contracting, debt-burdened and consolidating, on land worth less than the loans against it. Same acreage, opposite trajectory, and the wine towns, the tourism infrastructure and the cost of living built during the boom don’t unwind on the same schedule.

Unfortunately, there is reason to doubt this “optimistic” prediction itself. The bottom could arrive sooner. It could also extend considerably longer and with more dire consequences. Consider this New York Times headline, which ran last week: “Sales Are So Low, California Wineries Are Burning Their Vineyards.”

The case for trusting First Citizens is that its analysts are genuine experts, and as a lender, the bank sees financial information on local wineries that no outsider does. That is also the case for doubting it: As a lender and a publicly traded company, First Citizens has a short-term incentive not to declare that the debt it holds is bad.

Every forecast, including my own, rests on assumptions. The first assumption is reasonable: that prices will stabilize as continued reductions in acreage bring supply back in line with demand, the simple law of supply and demand.

The second is more questionable: that millennials, and the generations that follow them, will acquire a taste for wine as they age, replacing the demand of a dying boomer generation. That assumption treats wine drinking as a product of aging itself, rather than of a generational culture shaped by confusion over the health effects of alcohol, and by the rise of cannabis, hard seltzer and craft cocktails alongside new, harder-edged sobriety norms. That second, shakier assumption is the one holding up the entire “optimistic” prediction.

Turning Back the Clock?

There is some indication that Sonoma County’s wine besotted political leadership is beginning to sober up. One action stands out. This past June, the Board of Supervisors approved an Agricultural Action Plan, directing county departments and partner agencies to coordinate support for growers. The plan is phased over three years, pairing short-term actions with longer-term policy changes tied to a General Plan update.

The short-term measure’s permitting reforms, an agricultural incubator and food security programs move through ordinances that don’t require the General Plan. The deeper changes, including a review of by-right agricultural uses and zoning designations, await a General Plan revision planned, not promised, for January 2029.

Together they would let grape growers experiment with diversifying revenue, minimize some costs and significantly open a door out of wine entirely, into other crops: a re-diversification of Sonoma County’s agriculture, away from near-monoculture, back toward food farming (in a county that currently imports much of its vegetables, fruit and nuts) and forward toward new housing.

At the start of this piece, I mentioned readers who might be inclined to smile at the wine industry’s misfortune, those for whom the industry meant high rents, an unbuyable home, labor exploitation, displacement, gentrification, wine politicians and a “gracious Wine Country living” identity they wanted no part of.

For those readers, wine’s contraction will indeed open space for alternative visions of Sonoma County. But getting there will likely be a painful process. I suggest opening a local wine to ease the pain.