Vineyard workers feel wine industry pain // America’s Cooling Relationship With Alcohol

California vineyard workers face job losses and reduced hours as falling wine demand leads to acreage cuts, mechanization, and financial strain for farm labor contractors.

Gallup has been tracking the U.S. consumer’s relationship with alcohol since 1939, with the two lowest moments before 2024 coming in 1939 and the mid-1980s.

Michelin has launched its first wine ratings, scoring top Burgundy and Bordeaux producers with a reach that dwarfs existing wine critics.

Countless years of rainfall on the mountain ranges surrounding our basin produced alluvial flood plains rich with minerals, organic matter and soil, resulting in a virtual Garden of Eden for those who arrived later and lived here.

And even after repeated visits, Spanish wine culture will continue to surprise and delight you with its old vines and innovative ways.

This is the first installation of a two-part opinion piece by Edward Cavanagh that commences a cautionary tale: understanding what it was that motivated China to develop a relationship with Australian wines and wineries provides a few clues about why the industry needs to be more careful in the future.

The story of the vintage is becoming clearer: yields on some grapes are down dramatically and ripening faster than usual, while the grapes that are seeing more normal yields are following a more leisurely path.

Ideal ripening weather has returned to Napa Valley vineyards after a brief heat wave last week.

Despite sluggish overall conditions in the U.S. wine market, which is projected to slip 3.5% to below 300 million cases this year, according to Impact Databank, there remain pockets of opportunity.

I hope you’ll forgive this column for being somewhat nostalgic. I want to begin by giving a picture of the wine-drinking habits and economics of a particular middle-class English family from the 1960s onwards.

A very different way of looking at wine history.

Pulling up vines in Gironde, France. The world of wine is shrinking.

The number of hectares planted to hemp in Gironde has risen sharply from 9 hectares last year to 34 this year.

The Napa-based Walsh Vineyard Management, which farms about 4,500 acres of vines for dozens of clients, began testing Thorvald robots this spring.

Australian producers have moved beyond the most acute fertiliser supply concerns that emerged earlier this year, but high prices and uncertain seasonal conditions are likely to continue weighing on fertiliser demand through to 2027, according to Rabobank’s latest global fertiliser outlook.

Native grape bacteria and fungi persist through fermentation, suggesting that regional factors that influence the microbiota could also affect wine profiles.

The hunt for ancient wine: how Patrick McGovern's chemistry traced the world's oldest vintages to Georgia, Armenia and the mountains of Iran.

Delta Air Lines has launched a new wine list that it claims "raises the bar for the industry." But why is Napa the only US-region represented? Sarah Neish investigates.

Your cidery doesn’t necessarily need to create its own destination to benefit from tourism.