Rendered at 01:20:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
alexandre_m 5 minutes ago [-]
> while young people are drinking less alcohol due to health and financial concerns
My observation is that gen-z spends less time socializing in real life, and drinking remains a social habit for the most part at a younger age. While they drink less, cannabis, vaping and psychedelics are on the rise.
It's a nice claim to say they are more responsible, but it tells an incomplete story.
legitster 4 hours ago [-]
My parents live in a massive fruit growing region of the country. Just this year, 2 of the major packing firms in the county both declared bankruptcy. It's not just the trade war, but years of shrinking seasonal workers that fell off to a trickle as well.
The knock on effect is massive. The seasonal workers supported a large permanent workforce - and more importantly tax revenues in the county are collapsing.
But the really important thing to understand is that once the industry is gone, it's gone for a long time. The other markets competing with the US are already expanding their industries to fill the void. Once those trees are planted, they produce fruit for several decades to come.
kyleee 40 minutes ago [-]
Trees?
mathgeek 9 minutes ago [-]
While technically incorrect, tree is informally used to describe grape vines in some regions. Similar to “tomato plants” which is a more common example.
King-Aaron 22 minutes ago [-]
If you have to argue about nomenclature then your argument is probably not worthwhile.
djmips 5 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps demand is going down abroad due to people eschewing US products.
- Tariffs so less international demand for US wine
- Canadian boycots of US products due to tariff wars
- Boomer wine buyers dying off
- younger generations drinking less overall and being less into wine
- everyone on GLP-1s drinking less
ortusdux 5 hours ago [-]
- Legal pot
sublinear 18 minutes ago [-]
???
THC has never been an alternative to alcohol. There are definitely people who prefer it instead of alcohol and there are people who use both.
I don't know anyone who thinks they're interchangeable unless they're solely looking at it as a political/functional slot to fill.
If you force a drunk who hates pot to switch and vice-versa, they genuinely might want to murder you, but why make this a wedge issue?
mathgeek 7 minutes ago [-]
I believe they mean having alternative choices in what one can legally consume to get high/drunk/etc. Anecdotally I know a few folks who went from illegal pot in high school to wine as adults because it is more socially acceptable, then back to pot when legal.
sublinear 6 minutes ago [-]
I don't know any pot smoker who ever gave a flying crap if it was legal. Let's not whitewash the past. It became legal for a reason.
If you feel this way about pot, have you not also considered that similar already occurred with alcohol roughly a century ago (in the USA)? Why do you think cops avoid overpolicing bars when they'd be entirely in their right to do so?
Personal use of drugs is the clearest example in all of criminal justice where people of all beliefs have to admit there really is a much bigger and widespread mental health problem at the root of it.
zug_zug 14 minutes ago [-]
I think gummies are a superior (more pleasant, healthier, safer) social lubricant than alcohol and I’m sure I’m not alone
sublinear 11 minutes ago [-]
> I think gummies are a superior (more pleasant, healthier, safer) social lubricant than alcohol and I’m sure I’m not alone
Yes, exactly you're proving my point. You see this as a slot to fill and are making it a wedge issue.
mc32 3 minutes ago [-]
Before it was legalized people went down to the 7-11 to buy beer/wine all legal, maybe a bum to steer around.
They didn't want to get to know scuzzy dudes selling pot or driving to areas of town where at night they have street takeovers to score some pot.
Now those scaredy cats have legal dispensaries from which to obtain their MJ legally. So they might opt for pot these days.
reactordev 4 hours ago [-]
- The economy
philipallstar 4 hours ago [-]
> - Tariffs so less international demand for US wine
Why's this?
legitster 4 hours ago [-]
I feel like this is a trolling question. Demand for US exports has never been lower in recent history.
philipallstar 3 hours ago [-]
Feelings aside, I was just asking a question because I didn't understand the link.
Borealid 3 hours ago [-]
Countries other than the US have, for reasons that you may choose to find mysterious, imposed tariffs on products exported from the US.
Tariffs raise the consumer-visible price of those goods. This then, due to demand elasticity, causes consumers in those non-US countries to buy fewer of those products.
Some impact may be badwill as well but quite a bit is first-order impact of second-order tariffs.
neom 5 hours ago [-]
Wasn't SGMA always the big long term problem for them anyway? I recall reading some time ago many are looking to pivot to solar farms.
Please don't jeer like this on HN. Wine grape growers all over the world are experiencing similar declines in demand. The same thing is happening in Australia (I know people personally affected by it) and it has nothing to do with any flavor of political rule.
Finding the hidden "leopards ate MY face!?" in 2026's news stories has become my latest hobby.
legitster 4 hours ago [-]
Even if that slippery slope logic were true, the vast vast vast majority of farmers in the country are some flavor of conservative. It would be hard to ignore all of them and also care about our food supply.
twright 3 hours ago [-]
I think OP was more pointing out a supreme irony with the farmer demographic. They rely heavily on seasonal immigrant labor yet they voted for immigrants to be rounded up and forbidden to enter the US. Their sales rely on exports (e.g. soybeans) and imports (tractor parts, fertilizer) yet they voted for a complete upending of the global trade system that benefitted them. So that they are complaining about the current economic climate while simultaneously politically being fully behind it is schadenfreude for many.
legitster 3 hours ago [-]
This is an unhelpful generalization.
Both political parties are made up of constituent cohorts. All Republicans are not anti-immigrant, anti-trade junkies in the same way all Democrats are not anti-work socialists. I think you'll find farmers in particular are generally much more pro-trade and pro-immigrant than the rest of the party.
The story is these farmers voted for Trump despite him tilting against their best interest. But the reality is they probably put up with his views on immigration and trade hoping they would be more than offset by his views on land use and tax policy (and have been sorely mistaken).
I know that people really want to make schadenfreude out of this But when the shoe is on the other foot and Republicans make these same kind of ad hominem attacks they equally fall flat. No, just because someone voted for Joe Biden doesn't make them a police-hating communist.
bgilroy26 29 minutes ago [-]
You aren't going to escape the association with President Donald John Trump. He is the present and future of the Republican party.
3 minutes ago [-]
apparent 4 hours ago [-]
Which policy related to Canada is affecting the grape business? I didn't see it referenced, and assumed that since it's being described as a trend over 3 years then it's not just about tariffs.
jleyank 3 hours ago [-]
Us alcohol products unavailable in most of Canada. So there’s a fair bit of export gone missing. And European response is probably reducing demand for us product in favour of their own.
programmertote 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure how the extra supply for grapes affect retail prices of grapes for regular consumption. But at Costco in Southern CA, the price of grapes have been fairly stable (~$5.99 - $7.99) over the last year or a little more.
Starman_Jones 4 hours ago [-]
California’s wine grapes (vitis vinifera) aren’t suitable for eating. Some varieties (vitis labrusca) can be used for table grapes or wine grapes, but those aren’t really grown in California.
4 hours ago [-]
iharuya 4 hours ago [-]
I don't mean to dismiss wine as something people can appreciate almost like art, but sometimes the pricing does feel a little absurd.
I once had a red from Franciscan, made from a vineyard right next to Opus One. To me it tasted remarkably similar, yet it cost more than 30x less.
1970-01-01 4 hours ago [-]
If demand is down globally, sell the land already. People will do everything except the hardest thing.
floatrock 5 minutes ago [-]
If you sell the land the rip up the vines, you've destroyed the winegrowing capacity.
That's fine if you believe this is a long-term trend and creative destruction needs to replace it with something. Maybe it will even be more economically productive than a strip mall or a subdivision. (Maybe...)
That's less fine if you think this is due to temporary fluctuations in demands, such as say decreased demand of american goods due to either economic status or perception of american goods in global markets. That framing is one where some stupid national-level moves may have destroyed or consolidated american economic might. And whether consolidation is the same thing as destruction, it at least decreases competition and increases mediocrity, which reading between the lines on your tone is something I suspect you in theory might support.
SwellJoe 4 hours ago [-]
While I enjoy a glass of wine every now and then, I'm not going to lament the decline of an industry producing alcoholic products; it's inarguably good that younger generations are drinking less. Sorry to the farmers, but profiting off of increasing public health risk maybe should be a precarious business. I'm not gonna get upset about tobacco farms shutting down or having to switch crops, and alcohol is just another addictive and harmful substance (I've known more people who died due to alcohol than any other substance, one in a drunk driving accident, one due to liver failure, two were alcoholics who died by suicide...can't be certain it was the alcohol, but addiction certainly didn't help their situation).
But, also, the income of younger generations has been crushed so much, the ones that do still drink can't afford expensive luxury booze. Decent wine is an expensive way to drink alcohol.
vehemenz 4 hours ago [-]
I’ll believe it when wine prices go down. Prove it!
toomuchtodo 5 hours ago [-]
If you’re a domestic US wine lover, now is a great time to be buying if you have the space to store it.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
:D
That said, American wine—and California wine in particular—has a bit of an IPA problem inasmuch as there is a lot of overpriced, overproduced swill being priced exceptionally high by international standards.
_jwr 3 hours ago [-]
It is incredibly difficult to sustainably run a winery in California. The margins are often negative without operating at a large scale, which is part of why the industry has consolidated heavily over the past few decades.
Often times, wealthy people buy wineries as a hobby to dabble in, but end up selling and calling it a day before it drains their cash. If you want to buy wine for cheap that is made in California, buy mass-market wine.
Smaller brands are generally expensive because that price is necessary to sustain operations, but most of the time that fails, and the owners end up selling.
alistairSH 4 hours ago [-]
Not just American wine... wines from any region have always been more expensive in the US.
Quick poking around Google... Italy, France, and Germany all have mid-tier bottles of their own domestic wine for far less than we (in the US) get any wine, domestic or import.
toomuchtodo 4 hours ago [-]
I get the swill at a discount :) "The best wine is the wine you like best." Best deal I recently got was a few hundred bottles for under $1k, <$5/bottle. Easier than the trek to a Trader Joe's or Costco, ymmv (and I don't feel bad throwing a bottle out if it isn't for me, versus a $100+ bottle).
nkrisc 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a great deal, but that’s quite a lot of space required to store them, no?
harvey9 4 hours ago [-]
'a lot' depends on how much you had to begin with.
toomuchtodo 4 hours ago [-]
Not really, takes up a large wall in a residential detached single family home basement somewhere in the Midwest. Everything is relative.
vehemenz 4 hours ago [-]
Don’t even need that. If they’re packed in wine boxes they take up hardly any space.
Ancalagon 4 hours ago [-]
Do you just buy barrels at that point?
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
Large-format bottles are criminally underappreciated this side of the Atlantic.
toomuchtodo 4 hours ago [-]
Only one so far, I'm willing to take more but not a lot on offer. Maybe I'm talking to the wrong suppliers. There's a right price for everything, but I am looking for fire sale|"going out of business" prices. Replies with leads welcome!
vrosas 4 hours ago [-]
I feel for the wine growers, but as an avid wine consumer I'm looking forward to better deals.
egl2020 7 minutes ago [-]
...and less variety. Growers are not going to stay in business by lowering their prices.
EPWN3D 3 hours ago [-]
I haven't noticed any retail wine prices stabilizing or decreasing, at least in the Bay Area. Napa wines are still exorbitantly priced, and imports are way the fuck more expensive due to tariffs.
thot_experiment 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ncphillips 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
shmoil 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lukeify 4 hours ago [-]
You realise to grow table grapes, you need to rip out the current vines you have right?
EdwardDiego 4 hours ago [-]
Wine grapes are rather nice to eat (at least the ones I've tried), but they're typically smaller than American table grapes I've experienced, but hey, sell them as heirloom varieties at Portland farmers markets maybe?
bigwheels 5 hours ago [-]
This is a totally different variety of grape compared to what they're setup to grow now.
I was thinking along the same vein, though - what about special varieties of grape juice?
It is objectively good if demand for alcohol goes down.
neom 4 hours ago [-]
It's gonna be quite a lot of additional surplus, and, they already do this. Surplus wine grapes get sold to concentrate makers, however, it pays less than it costs to grow them because concentrate is basically a commodity sweetener competing with sugar, corn syrup, and apple concentrate. Bottled grape juice is a small and shrinking market, and in that market, most people expect Concord flavour (these aren't that), plus a lot of bottled juice is reconstituted from that same commodity concentrate anyway.
ScoobleDoodle 4 hours ago [-]
Yes! I don't drink alcohol but have gone wine tasting with friends and one vineyard had grape juice from some of their grapes and it was interesting and yummy.
An interesting variety of grape juices would be very cool.
onlypassingthru 4 hours ago [-]
NA grape soda made from wine varietals is a niche product you can find in some wine producing regions here in the US and usually fairly expensive for a soda. All of the ones I've tried are pretty tasty, tough!
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
Why put something on sale when it is selling just fine at the current rates?
shmoil 4 hours ago [-]
I guess I am an outlier, I did not have any grapes until September, when Ontario grapes became available.
It did not feel right to buy murican grapes at full price in the middle of the summer.
rayiner 4 hours ago [-]
We shouldn’t be farming things in California.
m4ck_ 6 minutes ago [-]
I'd worry about farming in Utah or Arizona deserts long before sonoma and central valley.. They're draining rivers and aquifers to grow grass in the desert to sell to even drier deserts in China and the middle east.
OkayPhysicist 3 hours ago [-]
Huh? We've got the best farmland in the US, possibly the world. It'd be a terrible shame not to take advantage of it.
rayiner 3 hours ago [-]
It has no water. That’s why it was worthless to Mexico before the U.S. annexed it and the Army Corps of Engineers terraformed it.
OkayPhysicist 2 hours ago [-]
You're confusing SoCal and the Central Valley here. Southern California (LA, San Diego, the Mojave Desert) doesn't have enough water. The Central Valley, fed by the Sacramento River from the Sierras and Cascades, and then extended south with canals, has plenty of water for agriculture. In fact, it was quite prone to flooding before we engineered the water shed.
All of which is irrelevant to the wine conversation, because the relatively dry climate is exactly what makes the Napa and Livermore valleys some of the best in the world to grow grapes. You've got good soil, dry summers allowing for control over how much water the grapes get that make them grow more flavorful, and very few frosts. The fact that the region gets almost all of their rainfall during the winter also helps avoid the grapes going to mold.
jleyank 3 hours ago [-]
Bit short of water, though…
Teknomadix 3 hours ago [-]
No, that's Colorado.
jleyank 3 hours ago [-]
SoCal has water?
rabidheuristics 18 minutes ago [-]
SoCal grows grapes?
gensym 8 minutes ago [-]
Temecula resident checking in... yes, it does.
It gets hot here, but Temecula gets a breeze from the ocean that makes it somewhat tolerable for growing grapes. The wines were tend to be the high-alcohol variety (think cabs and zins) because those are what grow better in the heat.
Most of the wines here aren't that good, but the wineries are more the attraction because they're beautiful and a short drive from LA, SD, or Palm Springs. Popular for weddings and bachelorette parties.
(There are some wineries here doing interesting things but if I'm buying wine to consume at home I'm usually looking for other regions than my backyard).
My observation is that gen-z spends less time socializing in real life, and drinking remains a social habit for the most part at a younger age. While they drink less, cannabis, vaping and psychedelics are on the rise.
It's a nice claim to say they are more responsible, but it tells an incomplete story.
The knock on effect is massive. The seasonal workers supported a large permanent workforce - and more importantly tax revenues in the county are collapsing.
But the really important thing to understand is that once the industry is gone, it's gone for a long time. The other markets competing with the US are already expanding their industries to fill the void. Once those trees are planted, they produce fruit for several decades to come.
https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/commodities/wine-related-produ...
- Canadian boycots of US products due to tariff wars
- Boomer wine buyers dying off
- younger generations drinking less overall and being less into wine
- everyone on GLP-1s drinking less
THC has never been an alternative to alcohol. There are definitely people who prefer it instead of alcohol and there are people who use both.
I don't know anyone who thinks they're interchangeable unless they're solely looking at it as a political/functional slot to fill.
If you force a drunk who hates pot to switch and vice-versa, they genuinely might want to murder you, but why make this a wedge issue?
If you feel this way about pot, have you not also considered that similar already occurred with alcohol roughly a century ago (in the USA)? Why do you think cops avoid overpolicing bars when they'd be entirely in their right to do so?
Personal use of drugs is the clearest example in all of criminal justice where people of all beliefs have to admit there really is a much bigger and widespread mental health problem at the root of it.
Yes, exactly you're proving my point. You see this as a slot to fill and are making it a wedge issue.
They didn't want to get to know scuzzy dudes selling pot or driving to areas of town where at night they have street takeovers to score some pot.
Now those scaredy cats have legal dispensaries from which to obtain their MJ legally. So they might opt for pot these days.
Why's this?
Tariffs raise the consumer-visible price of those goods. This then, due to demand elasticity, causes consumers in those non-US countries to buy fewer of those products.
Some impact may be badwill as well but quite a bit is first-order impact of second-order tariffs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Groundwater_Manage...
Please always observe the guidelines when participating here, which include avoiding political/ideological battle and off-topic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Both political parties are made up of constituent cohorts. All Republicans are not anti-immigrant, anti-trade junkies in the same way all Democrats are not anti-work socialists. I think you'll find farmers in particular are generally much more pro-trade and pro-immigrant than the rest of the party.
The story is these farmers voted for Trump despite him tilting against their best interest. But the reality is they probably put up with his views on immigration and trade hoping they would be more than offset by his views on land use and tax policy (and have been sorely mistaken).
I know that people really want to make schadenfreude out of this But when the shoe is on the other foot and Republicans make these same kind of ad hominem attacks they equally fall flat. No, just because someone voted for Joe Biden doesn't make them a police-hating communist.
I once had a red from Franciscan, made from a vineyard right next to Opus One. To me it tasted remarkably similar, yet it cost more than 30x less.
That's fine if you believe this is a long-term trend and creative destruction needs to replace it with something. Maybe it will even be more economically productive than a strip mall or a subdivision. (Maybe...)
That's less fine if you think this is due to temporary fluctuations in demands, such as say decreased demand of american goods due to either economic status or perception of american goods in global markets. That framing is one where some stupid national-level moves may have destroyed or consolidated american economic might. And whether consolidation is the same thing as destruction, it at least decreases competition and increases mediocrity, which reading between the lines on your tone is something I suspect you in theory might support.
But, also, the income of younger generations has been crushed so much, the ones that do still drink can't afford expensive luxury booze. Decent wine is an expensive way to drink alcohol.
That said, American wine—and California wine in particular—has a bit of an IPA problem inasmuch as there is a lot of overpriced, overproduced swill being priced exceptionally high by international standards.
Often times, wealthy people buy wineries as a hobby to dabble in, but end up selling and calling it a day before it drains their cash. If you want to buy wine for cheap that is made in California, buy mass-market wine.
Smaller brands are generally expensive because that price is necessary to sustain operations, but most of the time that fails, and the owners end up selling.
Quick poking around Google... Italy, France, and Germany all have mid-tier bottles of their own domestic wine for far less than we (in the US) get any wine, domestic or import.
I was thinking along the same vein, though - what about special varieties of grape juice?
It is objectively good if demand for alcohol goes down.
An interesting variety of grape juices would be very cool.
It did not feel right to buy murican grapes at full price in the middle of the summer.
All of which is irrelevant to the wine conversation, because the relatively dry climate is exactly what makes the Napa and Livermore valleys some of the best in the world to grow grapes. You've got good soil, dry summers allowing for control over how much water the grapes get that make them grow more flavorful, and very few frosts. The fact that the region gets almost all of their rainfall during the winter also helps avoid the grapes going to mold.
It gets hot here, but Temecula gets a breeze from the ocean that makes it somewhat tolerable for growing grapes. The wines were tend to be the high-alcohol variety (think cabs and zins) because those are what grow better in the heat.
Most of the wines here aren't that good, but the wineries are more the attraction because they're beautiful and a short drive from LA, SD, or Palm Springs. Popular for weddings and bachelorette parties.
(There are some wineries here doing interesting things but if I'm buying wine to consume at home I'm usually looking for other regions than my backyard).