California’s wine slump cuts vineyard jobs after growers remove 25% of acreage

California’s long downturn in the wine market is hitting vineyard workers across the state, as growers remove acreage, leave fruit unpicked and replace some hand labor with machines to cut losses from weak demand and excess supply.

The pullback has built over several years. Since 2023, lower wine consumption has left many growers with more grapes than buyers wanted, according to Ag Alert. Industry leaders told the publication that some producers sold fruit at a loss while others let grapes remain on the vines. To reduce costs, vineyard owners removed an estimated 25% of California’s winegrape acreage, a shift that has sharply reduced work for farm labor crews in regions including Napa, Lodi, the Central Valley and the coast.

The job damage appears to be significant, even if the full scale is difficult to measure. In 2022, California winegrape vineyards supported the equivalent of 49,372 full-time jobs, or about 12% of all farm jobs in the state, according to a report commissioned by the California Association of Winegrape Growers. Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, said a reasonable starting point is that vineyard employment losses likely tracked the 25% drop in acreage. He added that growers still farming vines have also been cutting labor wherever possible.

“There’s a huge impact on the farm labor community,” Bitter told Ag Alert.

Workers and labor contractors described a market slump that has cut hours, paychecks and, in many cases, entire crews. Guadalupe Gonzalez, a vineyard crew supervisor in Napa Valley for Jaguar Farm Labor Contracting Inc., said harvest seasons once brought steady work seven days a week, allowing her to save for the offseason. Last year, she said, work slowed as more grapes went unharvested and wineries increased machine harvesting. This year has been worse. A few weeks into harvest, Gonzalez told Ag Alert she was working every other day and earning less than half of what she made a few years ago.

She said many crew members were feeling desperate as housing, child care and other expenses continued to rise. Her pay, she said, barely covered child care for her two young children.

Vineyard managers say labor-intensive tasks are increasingly being reduced or mechanized. Aaron Lange, president of LangeTwins Inc. in Acampo, said leaf pulling once brought thousands of workers into Lodi-area vineyards every spring so sunlight and air could reach the canopy. This year, he said, he saw very few crews doing that work. When it was done, it was often done by machine.

The shift has not affected all jobs in the same way. Bitter said growers usually try to cut contract labor first while holding on to direct employees. But as financial pressure continued, some had little choice but to lay off workers more broadly. Seasonal labor rules also make the employment fallout harder to see in official records. Philip Martin, professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, said mass-layoff reporting laws do not apply to seasonal labor, and federal employment data do not break out many contract workers by crop.

Farm labor contractors that specialize in vineyards said their businesses have shrunk sharply. Steve McIntyre, chief executive of Monterey Pacific Inc., a Soledad-based company that manages vineyards across several coastal counties, said he employs about 20% fewer people than he did a few years ago.

Noe Cisneros, owner of Bakersfield-based Empire Ag Inc., said his company went from about 900 workers to 150 over the past three years. He told Ag Alert that the biggest blow came when a major winery client removed vineyards in Kern and Tulare counties, while other clients also reduced acreage.

“We’ve been knocking on doors, trying to find new contracts for our crews to continue working, but it’s become very hard,” Cisneros said. “It’s tough all around.”

Kimberly Clark, executive director of the California Farm Labor Contractor Association, said several contractors that focused on vineyard work have shut down entirely.

Some workers may be able to move into other crops, but contractors and crew leaders said that option is limited for many people, especially older workers or those whose experience is concentrated in winegrapes. Gonzalez said she looked for other farm jobs to offset lost vineyard income but could not find work. Mario Galvan, owner of Galvan Farming Services Inc. in Lockeford, said his business in the Lodi area has fallen by nearly half in the past few years. He said harvest income for the workers he still employs is down about 40% this year, and he has had to lay off longtime crew leaders.

“A lot of families have been doing this for many years,” Galvan said.

In Sonoma County, grower and vineyard manager Andrew Forchini said the market change has been severe. Two years ago, he sold nearly all of his fruit. This year, he said, he may leave 90% of it unharvested. With so few grapes to pick, his three employees have lost a major source of income. In March, he started a separate land management business in Healdsburg, partly to give those workers a chance to earn money through gardening, landscaping and property repair.

The downturn matters beyond vineyard payrolls. California remains central to the U.S. wine business, and a sustained reduction in acreage and hand labor could affect how wineries plan grape sourcing, harvest timing and production costs. If vineyard removals continue and more fruit is left unpicked in some regions, that could change the mix of available grapes and increase pressure on long-term supply planning across the beverage sector, even as the current problem is oversupply rather than shortage.

For now, most industry participants expect the market to keep adjusting downward to match lower demand for wine. Ag Alert reported that experts do not yet know when the winegrape market will stabilize. In the meantime, the burden is falling heavily on workers whose incomes depend on a crop that no longer offers the same volume of work.

Gonzalez said she still cares deeply about vineyard work after more than a decade in the field, but the prolonged contraction has forced her to think about leaving it. As the harvest moves forward with fewer crews and fewer acres, workers across California’s wine regions are facing the same decision.