IN California, a place famous around the world for its viticulture, winemakers produced less wine last year than at any point in the last quarter century.
It’s often cheaper to let grapes rot on the vine than to harvest them because so many unsold bottles clog the shelves of storerooms and wine shops.
So on a sunny morning in Soledad, California, in a valley made famous by author John Steinbeck, Jason Smith acquiesced to simple economics.
A worker unceremoniously drove a tractor and ripped Smith’s pinot noir grapes from the ground. Another set fire to the wooden posts that for years had propped up the vines.
And Smith leaned against his white Suburban, under the shade of a coastal oak, watching one of his pinot vineyards go up in smoke.
He had decided to sell all of his land and shut down his family business, which had survived for 51 years.
“There’s literally no way for me to make money,” Smith, 57, said.
Nationwide, wine sales are at their lowest level in more than two decades, as people drink less amid growing health concerns.
Sales have also suffered, as many younger drinkers have found traditional wines stodgy and difficult to understand and prefer canned cocktails, seltzers and non-alcoholic beers and spirits.
In California, which produces about 80% of the nation’s wines, pinot noir perhaps best illustrates the industry’s recent boom-and-bust history.
The light-bodied wine originally from France’s Burgundy region was once less popular among average wine drinkers in California than reds such as cabernet sauvignon and merlot.
Then came the 2004 movie Sideways, which starred Paul Giamatti as an aspiring novelist and wine snob who extolled pinot noir’s “thrilling and subtle” flavours.
The indie film set off a pinot noir boom in California.
Sleepy tasting rooms in Central California, where the movie took place, filled with customers. Those already producing pinot sold out their inventories in record time. Across the state, growers planted it anywhere they could.
“You could almost feel it,” said Mark McWilliams, who recently closed his pinot noir-focused winery in Sonoma County and recalled the frenzy of the 2000s. “All people wanted was pinot noir.”
In the early 1970s, Smith’s family moved to coastal Monterey County because his father, who had a degree in agriculture and had been working in a lab, saw promise in the nascent wine business here.
The region, about 160km south of San Francisco, is an agricultural hub with hot sunny days and foggy nights, the perfect climate for cultivating the delicate grapes needed for pinot noir and chardonnay.
At first, Smith’s family helped other vineyard owners grow grapes. Then they bought their own land.
Over time, his company, Valley Farm Management, acquired over 1,200ha and sold fruit to some of the largest wineries in the state.
Smith was already growing pinot noir when Sideways premiered. Later, he replaced some of his merlot grapes with more pinot. (The film also dealt a blow to merlot sales after Giamatti’s character dismissed it as swill.)
His winery had its highest profits in the few years after the movie came out.
But demand for wine grapes, particularly pinot noir, began to dry up a few years ago as wine sales plummeted, Smith said.
He tried to give discounts to other vintners, but he still couldn’t make the math work.
The slump in California has in particular hit red wines, which tend to have a bolder taste and higher alcohol content.
In 2025, for the first time in decades, winemakers in the state produced less red wine than white wine.
Pinot noir remains the second most popular red wine made in California, and experts say that some of the vines that growers are ripping out were planted after Sideways in places less suitable for delicate pinot grapes.
Still, production of pinot has dropped 30% in California since 2021. Across the state, growers have also been replacing the grapes with lesser-known white wine varieties that customers increasingly prefer, such as fiano and grüner veltliner.
“We were so pinot noir-centric,” Smith said. “And then there just wasn’t the demand.”
In 2025, roughly 15,400ha of wine grapes were pulled out across California, about 7% of all grapes planted statewide, according to data from the California Association of Winegrape Growers.
More than 500,000 tonnes of grapes also went unpicked, according to industry estimates.
To pay off debts and avoid bankruptcy, Smith sold his trophy vineyard to Jackson Family Wines, which owns more than two dozen California wine labels, and other parcels to private equity companies.
He is selling equipment for cash.
“This is all I’ve done my whole life,” Smith said. “I’m going to have to find a new career.” — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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