Why Winemakers Aren't Feeling Divine About The 2025 Harvest Season

If you think picking a bottle of wine from a crowded supermarket shelf is hard, you should try running a winery. From unpredictable weather to shifting consumption patterns, making and selling wine is basically like playing a board game where the rules keep changing. Now, a perfect storm of environmental and social factors is leaving many winemakers feeling uneasy about the 2025 harvest season.

According to a recent report, vineyards in California have seen a sharp drop in demand triggered by a variety of reasons, from an increase in the number of cheap imported wines to a drop in consumption among the younger generation. In the report, Natalie Collins, President of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, explained that 37,000 acres of vineyards were removed last year, with another 50,000 acres at risk of being taken over by other crops.

This is on the back of two years of very different weather patterns — a challenge itself. Doug Filipponi, co-founder of Santa Margarita's Ancient Peaks Winery, told Tasting Table that 2024 saw at least two weeks of very hot days and lots of variation in temperature, whereas 2025 has seen just three days where temperatures touched 100°F. "That's very unusual. There was also a spell of unseasonal rain which threatened to ruin certain thin-skin varieties of grapes," Filipponi said. The quality of grapes isn't the only cause for concern, though. Everything around it seems in flux as well.

While Filipponi agrees the industry is at a low, he believes these things are cyclical. Through the pandemic, while the rest of the Food & Beverage industry struggled, the winemakers saw an uptick. "There was a lot of what we call pantry packing, where a person could go buy two or three bottles for what they'd buy one bottle at a restaurant," Filipponi said. According to Nielsen research, one of America's leading online wine retailers reported a 217% increase in revenue for the second half of 2020. Wine was flying off the shelves, both premium bottles as well as cheap wines that tasted expensive. "It created a little bit of a false sense of security for a lot of producers," Filipponi said.

Larger trends include declining consumption, which is at a record low. A recent study stated that only 54% of Americans drank alcohol today (down from 2022's 67%). It probably didn't help that, around the same time, the World Health Organization announced that any amount of alcohol was unhealthy. "We look at it in a different light. You have to be sensible about consumption of any kind of alcohol," Filipponi said, adding that the industry was going through a phase where people are clearly being a little more cautious.

Two years ago, the European Union predicted a sharp drop in wine consumption, including a 15% year-on-year drop in France, the world's largest wine producer. Rising inflation and reduced spending power are also causes for this decrease.

Charles Smith, owner and winemaker for House of Smith, doesn't deny the problem of budget-friendly wines flooding the market, but feels American winemakers should avoid getting caught up in a race to the bottom. "The real problem is that the corporate and big wine families that built America's wine business are now destroying it by not delivering what people want," Smith told Tasting Table. Today's drinkers are looking for quality and honesty, neither of which the American industry was providing, he explained.

According to Smith, one could use up to 76 approved ingredients to make wine without having to declare them on the label. Many of these, from fish bladders to mega purple (a thick grape juice concentrate that adds color), are additives and stabilizers that would probably cause an even sharper drop in sales if revealed on labels. "Europe's already ahead with mandatory labeling. It's time America caught up," Smith said, adding that House of Smith now lists ingredients on every label in its portfolio.

Both Smith and Filipponi agree that the short harvest doesn't have to be viewed as a setback, but as a chance to focus on quality. Smith said smaller harvests produced wines with "remarkable complexity and intensity." Filipponi is predicting a high-quality batch as well. "When you don't have those big variations in temperature, and you just have a nice, even growing season, the quality is going to be really good. This '25 harvest should be phenomenal quality," he said.