Picking A Side In the Napa Winery Fight

No it's not Monday when I normally post. I got inspired midweek from Tom Wark who wrote a piece yesterday in his Fermentation Daily Wine Blog entitled Critics of the Napa Valley Wine Industry are Losing Badly. It's a passionate opinion piece of the goings-on in Napa County politics which are overheated with rhetoric. (Rhetoric | rhet·o·ric \ˈre-tə-rik\: language that is intended to influence people and that may not be honest or reasonable.)

Bottle Prices Are Going Up in 2016

How much does this wine cost?

The Annual Wine Conditions Survey is open and delivering interesting early information on supply, price, and many other interesting questions. The survey closes next week but after the first week, almost 300 of your fellow wineries have invested 12 minutes. Why take the survey when we are all busy? Because participants are the only ones who will get complete results.

 

Open: 2016 Survey of Wine Conditions

 

 

 

 

What's really going on in the wine business this moment? Can wineries raise prices? What's the supply situation in the Central Valley? Is there good land available for planting anywhere? Where is there too much supply? With the crush in the tanks now, winery owners are starting to think about 2016 and making plans.

 

I started researching for the Annual State of the Wine Industry Report in August and have a good idea what it's going to look like already, but I always like getting another layer of information of the current situation. So for the past decade now, I've led a survey of the current conditions in which more than 600 wineries and the major AVA's from across the country participate every year.

 

Ten years since we started this, I'm told by winery owners that new surveys now show up in email boxes every week. Thankfully I'm consistently told, "We look for your survey and make sure to participate." Why are we so lucky to get this kind of participation? I think there are a few reasons but bottom line, we keep the information anonymous, we aren't selling the information, and we give back more than we take.

 

The survey takes about 10 minutes and in exchange, we send without cost the complete survey results, dozens of relevant graphs, and our early analysis on wine industry conditions. [Last year's survey results].

 

Note the results this year will be released in early December only to those who participate in the survey. Ready to take the survey? Click on the link below.