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It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Juana Summers.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
And I'm Mary Louise Kelly. And it is grape harvesting season for winemakers across the country. But with the world wine market sluggish these last few years, many in the U.S. industry say they are so backed up with unsold wine, they are dropping grapes to the ground or not harvesting them at all. As Anna King with Northwest Public Broadcasting reports, some say this is the worst year the wine industry has seen in decades.
(SOUNDBITE OF HARVESTER WHIRRING)
ANNA KING, BYLINE: Red Mountain in Washington is among the state's premier wine growing spots. Sarah Goedhart watches as a hulking mechanical harvester straddles a row of grapes at her family's vineyard, Hedges Family Estate. It rattles the vines from both sides, and all her hard work drops onto a conveyor belt and then gets dumped on the ground.
SARAH GOEDHART: It's wine that's never going to be made, and for a vintage as good as we're having this year, it's pretty painful.
KING: Goedhart is the top winemaker here and has been through almost two dozen harvests, but this is the first year she's thrown fruit away. That's because her cellar is stuffed to the rafters with barrels of the previous two years of wine that haven't sold.
GOEDHART: It's pretty typical to have the previous vintage in-barrel during harvest, but not two vintages in-barrel.
KING: They're harvesting half of their grapes and dropping half. If they leave the fruit on the vine, she says the plants could be at a risk for fungus and diseases. Goedhart says they want to make sure the vines stay healthy so they can keep producing wine if the market comes back.
GOEDHART: What everyone is saying in the industry is we're at the low of the low, and it's going to get better. And we're going to readjust.
KING: The Hedges' sales last year were down 13% from the year before, and they've cut about that in expenses and staff to keep solvent. Now, her family is having to dip into personal assets. This isn't just happening in Washington.
NATALIE COLLINS: Today, the California wine industry is facing one of the most serious downturns that we've seen in decades. And it's not really because of one singular issue. It is a combination of challenges all hitting at once.
KING: Natalie Collins is the president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, based in Sacramento. She says the uncertainty of tariffs is causing uncertainty in the markets for one, and retaliatory measures from other countries have hit exports hard. But also, over the past few years, she says global demand for wine has declined. In part, that's due to competition from other beverages like beers, ciders, seltzers, cocktails, NA drinks and cannabis products, and increasing concerns about the health risks of drinking.
COLLINS: We're seeing new generations not drinking as much alcohol as past generations have.
KING: She says that's led to an oversupply of wine globally. Some places are ripping out their vineyards or abandoning them. Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Chris King with the New York State Wine Grape Growers says he knows several vineyards that are very near to going out of business.
CHRIS KING: It's your neighbors. You feel their hardship. You feel their pain. And to see somebody who has put their life and their fortune and their dreams into this business and have it go away is just really sad to watch.
KING: While right now, the impact of the grape glut is mostly being felt by those in the wine industry, some think that eventually it could impact consumers. Adam Schulz runs the Incredible Bulk Wine Company in Washington State, which makes matches between winemakers and companies looking for bulk wine or grapes.
ADAM SCHULZ: At some point, we're going to cross the threshold where there isn't enough bulk wine inventory, there aren't enough grapes in the ground.
KING: He says that as more vineyards scale back, eventually the industry might resize so small that years from now, we might be looking at a wine shortage. For NPR News, I'm Anna King on Red Mountain in Washington state. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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