According to a study from Silicon Valley Bank in California, around half of all American wine estates will change hands over the next ten years.
I read this on a French wine blog, 'findawine.com, le blog', and thought it was interesting in light of the financial crisis, and what might therefore happen in Bordeaux in the future.
The study showed that the owners of wine estates in California, Oregon and Washington (the three states with the most wineries) are mainly nearing retirement age, and many will be looking to sell their properties rather than hand them on to family in the more typical Bordeaux manner, as their children realise the difficulties in running wine properties. Here of course they just see the difficulties as part of the natural order of things!
Today, there are 5,000 wineries in the States, producing around 7,000 different labels, which are sold to around 450 distributors in the US. In the past few years, the number of wines produced has doubled, and the number of distributors halved. This means increasing problems for small owners who can't negociate prices and have to do whatever the distributors want to get those all-important shelf spots.
The minimum quantity to be able to negociate with these distributors is a production of aorund one million cases a year - and of course most small properties are far from this number. Medium sized wineries are starting to look to buy up their smaller neighbours to increase their production to this 'magic number' - and this is where the prediction came from that within 10 years, over half of current wineries would either change hands or be bought out/merged with other properties.
