I had a debate with my family once about the most popular wine grape. (I thought it would be Merlot…I was wrong.) This weekend, I was in Napa and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to make a graphic on the subject. So here it is - the distribution of wine grapes in California. The land acreage dedicated to growing wine grapes is not surprising. Napa leads the way, with 9.60% of its land area used for growing wine grapes. San Joaquin takes second at 8.20%, and Sonoma, third, at 5.97%. Note the scale is nonlinear because so many counties are below 1%. Most counties grow more red than white wine grapes. However, Chardonnay claims the most overall acreage.

Data source: http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/California/Publications/Grape_Acreage/