Sometimes Less Is More

We spent last week camping in a beautiful part of Idaho, just outside the town of McCall. It was exactly the kind of place you’d hope to find on vacation. Towering pines, cool mountain air and, much to my surprise, absolutely no cell service. It felt a bit like our own private Idaho. That can be both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing? I actually had time to read a book.

The curse? We had an email newsletter to send out and I came home to a whole lot of catching up.

Among the emails waiting for me was one from my mom. She had forwarded a New York Times article titled Sales Are So Low, California Wineries Are Burning Their Vineyards. My first thought was, “You can’t burn grapevines in the middle of summer.” Then I actually read the article.

I immediately wrote her back with one word.

“NO!!!”

The article explained that more than 38,000 acres of California vineyards were removed in 2025 and more than half a million tons of grapes were left hanging because there wasn’t enough demand to justify harvesting them. I know firsthand that a lot of grapes went unsold here in El Dorado County last year. Then, almost as if he knew what I’d been thinking about all week, I received an email from fellow winemaker Paul Bush at Madroña Vineyards.

Paul has been writing emails in blog form for years. He’s one of the best communicators our region has and has a wonderful sense of humor too. His email began,

“I think I’m going to write about mothballing vineyards during these times, you know, just to keep things upbeat!”

He always has a way of making you smile, even when he’s delivering bad news.

If you’ve visited Holly’s Hill during the past couple of years and looked out over our original vineyard, you’ve probably noticed that the top of the hill doesn’t look quite like the bottom anymore. Years of struggling with our well dramatically reduced production in those upper blocks. Eventually we made the difficult decision to stop farming parts of the vineyard altogether. It simply cost too much to keep them going. When we ran the numbers, we realized we could purchase excellent grapes for as little as one-third of what it was costing us to grow our own. That wasn’t an easy decision. Every grower wants to make wine from their own vineyards.

Here’s the strange part. A few years later, with wine sales slowing across the industry, we’re actually a little fortunate that we don’t have all those acres producing. When you buy grapes, you order exactly what you need. Six tons. Eight tons. Ten tons. That’s your choice. When you farm vineyards, Mother Nature makes that decision. Some years you get a short crop, some years you get a bumper crop. Normally, growers celebrate bumper crops. Today, not always.

If there is no market for the fruit or no way to sell all of it as wine, a big crop can become a very expensive problem. It’s one of those strange moments where what once felt like a setback has become an unexpected advantage. I’d much rather be writing about record wine sales than vineyard economics. But this business has always had a way of keeping us humble.

We’ll continue to navigate this interesting time in the wine industry, and we’ll keep sneaking away to go camping whenever we can.

By the way, my camping book was Havana by Mark Kurlansky. So if you ever want to talk Cuba, I’m game.

Oh, and speaking of game, as we were packing up camp to come home, we spotted a huge cow moose standing in the river just behind our tent. That was something worth losing cell service for.

Josh Bendick

Co-winemaker