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As much as 10 percent of red grapes may have been left on the vine in California last year.

The 2019 crush was smaller than the previous year's record, but growers are still worried about oversupply.

California's winegrowers may have reached a ceiling – the 2019 grape crush was 9.1 percent smaller than the record 2018 crush, and is the smallest overall since 2011, according to the California Department of Food & Agriculture.

In Napa County, the drop in crush was even more dramatic: 20.1 percent fewer white grapes crushed in 2019 than in 2018, and 15.5 percent fewer red grapes.

However, the drops shown in the CDFA's annual Grape Crush Report, which was released Monday, are mostly due to growers leaving grapes unharvested on the vines. The vines are still in the ground and, depending on the weather, are still capable of producing another 2018-size crop this year.

The wine industry as a whole wants to avoid that. Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, told farmers last week that they must rip 30,000 acres of vines out of the ground to fix California's oversupply problem. That's 121 square kilometers: about the size of the city of San Francisco.

The problem is that wine sales in the US have slowed after 25 years of consistent growth. A recent report from market analysts bw166 says that wine sales actually did go up slightly in the US in 2019, but not by as much as in recent years.

Steve Fredricks, president of Turrentine Grape Brokerage, cautioned that a smaller crush in 2019 doesn't mean that the landscape is better for farmers.

"It's good that the tons were down," Fredricks told Wine-Searcher. "It's down to a greater percent in the coastal areas that had a big 2019 crop. People are going to point to some huge discrepancies from the 2018 crop and say, wow, that's great. But you have to remember 2018 was a historically big crop."

Leaving grapes on the vine

Let's look at some of those huge discrepancies. Statewide, the red crush was down 12.8 percent in 2019, compared to only a 4.3 percent drop in the white wine crush. (Chardonnay, still the state's most-planted grape, had a bigger drop, at 10.4 percent.)

Red wine sales are not declining in the US, and plantings are not down, so looking at the numbers, I have a theory: as the 2019 harvest advanced, farmers were more likely to leave grapes that always ripen late on the vine, because they learned wineries were not buying grapes on the spot market.

As evidence, the following later-harvested red grapes all had statewide drops larger than the state average:

* Pinot Noir, down 16.1 percent

* Grenache, down 15.9 percent

* Cabernet Sauvignon, down 15.5 percent

* Mourvedre, down 15.4 percent

* Merlot, down 15.4 percent.

Poor Merlot. Remember when Napa Merlot was one of the nation's favorite wines? Last year the Napa County crush of Merlot was down 27.8 percent from 2018, one of the largest of all drops for a major region-variety combination. Napa's Chardonnay crush was down 23.5 percent, but Napa Cabernet Sauvignon was down only 12.3 percent.

It's easiest to talk about Napa County because the region has its own grape-pricing district for statewide reporting.

The Central Coast, in contrast, is divided into three regions, with warm Paso Robles and chillier Santa Barbara County lumped together in one. That district had a crush 15.3 percent smaller than in 2019. The grape pricing district just north of there, which includes Monterey County, had a 19.8 percent smaller crush.

Sonoma and Marin Counties combined (mostly Sonoma) had a crush 19.1 percent smaller than in 2019. The Chardonnay crush there was down 23.5 percent; Pinot Noir was down 20.5 percent.

Mendocino County's crush was 17.9 percent smaller.

Prices don't relect reality

For the industry as a whole, the point of harvesting fewer grapes is to keep up the price for them. To some extent that was successful, although Fredricks said last week that there is as much bulk wine available in California as there has been in a decade. The statewide average price for red grapes dropped only 2.8 percent to be the second-highest average price in history after 2018. White grapes took a bigger price hit, dropping 8.5 percent.

Fredricks said that high average prices don't reflect the reality of the marketplace.

"If grapes weren't harvested, they don't count the average price as zero," Fredricks said. "Very few grapes sold on the spot market. Most grapes were sold based on contracts signed years ago." He said that many wineries are leaving those contracts when they expire.

The 2018 crop was also above average size in western Europe, and that should contribute to pressure on wineries to keep prices low (although tariffs are a wild card). Consumers might see some benefit from the big 2018 California crop that is just beginning to make its way through distribution channels like an elephant just swallowed by a python. Even with so much crop left on the vine, there are still more grapes and wines in California right now than there are buyers.

"We have been seeing opportunistic small brands taking advantage of the marketplace," Fredricks said. "Going around the bigger brands and taking them right to the retailers as private labels. We're starting to see a lot of strategic brands popping up to sell that oversupply."

In other words, look for brands you've never heard of before, and might not hear of again: they could be one-time bargains.

And please toast the grape farmers of California. They've seen better times.