I’ve had a hunch for a long time about something and after doing some research, wanted to share it with you. Red wine is dying. Not gone — dying. And the numbers are now too big to ignore.
Of course we’ve all seen the articles of how wine consumption is way down — and yes that’s a major problem for the industry. However, I’m specifically looking at red wine consumption, specifically versus white and rosé.
I’m not talking about some trend piece about millennials drinking orange wine. I’m talking about growers in our PNW backyard — the Columbia Gorge, the Willamette Valley, Walla Walla — watching red grapes rot on the vine because nobody will buy them. I’m talking about tens of thousands of acres of California vines ripped out of the ground, with tens of thousands more expected to follow. I’m talking about France (France!) now selling more white and rosé than red for the first time in modern history.
If you drink wine, this affects you. If you buy wine, it should change what you’re buying right now.
The numbers don’t lie
The OIV — the closest thing wine has to a global governing body — confirmed it: white and rosé consumption together have overtaken red worldwide. Red wine consumption is down 15% from its peak in 2007. White is up 10% and rosé up 17% from their lows around the turn of the century.
In France, red wine made up 57% of supermarket sales in 2010. By 2024, it was 42%. More than two-thirds of French 18-to-24-year-olds say they flat out don’t like the taste of red wine. In France. The country that practically invented the category.
The United States isn’t far behind. Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 State of the US Wine Industry Report — the most respected annual snapshot of the business — put it bluntly. Total US wine volume dropped to 329 million cases in 2025, down from roughly 336 million the year before. Dollar value fell from $75.5 billion to $74.3 billion. Rob McMillan, the report’s author, said something that should scare every red wine producer in the country: “This is not a cycle you can wait out.”
The Pacific Northwest is ground zero
The story in Washington and Oregon is even worse than the national picture, because these are regions that bet it all on red.
The 2025 Oregon Vineyard Census found that 61% of growers left some fruit unharvested or harvested nothing at all. The reason? Among those who didn’t bring in their whole crop, 74% said “no buyer for grapes.” Not a quality problem. Not a weather problem. Nobody wanted their fruit.
Washington has 61,200 acres of vineyard, and the state wine commission has recommended pulling out 10,000 of them. Between Washington and Oregon there are 22,000 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon and 28,000 acres of Pinot Noir — both described as “overexposed in the market.” That’s the polite way of saying there’s far more wine than there are people willing to drink it.
California is ripping out vineyards at historic pace
California crushed just over 2.6 million tons of wine grapes in 2025 — an 8.4% decline from the year before, and the smallest crush since 1999. That’s not a typo. The biggest wine-producing state in the country hasn’t crushed this little fruit in over 25 years.
The acreage numbers tell the real story. Roughly 37,000 acres came out in 2024, and an estimated 40,000 more are coming out after the 2025 harvest. Even with about 20,000 new acres planted each year, the net loss is staggering.
Cabernet Sauvignon — California’s flagship grape — was down 4.8% to 432,666 tons. Pinot Noir dropped 12.9% to 189,842 tons. Meanwhile, Sauvignon Blanc was up 16.1% and Pinot Grigio up 4.2%. The market is telling growers exactly what it wants.
What the grape market actually did
Check this stat out: In 2025, California crushed more white grapes than red for the first time since 1996. White came in at 1,324,465 tons against 1,301,690 tons of red. It’s a narrow margin, but the last time it happened Bill Clinton was in his first term.
The contracting picture is worse than the crush. According to Jeff Bitter of Allied Grape Growers, roughly half of California’s 2025 crop went into harvest with no buyer contract at all — in a normal year, 70 to 80% is spoken for before the fruit is picked. About 20% of the crop was simply never harvested, because there was nobody to sell it to.
Sauvignon Blanc, meanwhile, had an all-time record harvest of roughly 161,000 tons, up 16%. Growers are not planting white because it’s fashionable. They’re planting it because buyers still answer the phone. (One caveat: white grape prices slipped last year too — Chardonnay 4.3% a ton, Sauvignon Blanc 4.4% — but that’s a record-size white crop arriving all at once, not white demand faltering.)
The bulk tanks tell the same story from the other end. As of February 2026 there were more than 35 million gallons of bulk wine on the market, and roughly 40% of the red inventory was from the 2023 vintage or older — wine that has been sitting, unsold, through two subsequent harvests. For Pinot Noir and Zinfandel it’s about half.
According to NielsenIQ, white wine accounted for 51% of all U.S. still wine volume sales in 2025 — the first time it has ever outsold red and rosé combined. As recently as 2023, white wine held just 48.5% of the market, with red at 45.1%. By 2024, white had climbed to 49.5% before breaking through the 50% barrier the following year.
Why this is happening
I see it from two sides — as a winemaker, and as someone who lives with a person whose wine preferences completely changed.
Cassie used to drink red equally as much as whites and her favorite, bubbles. After having kids, she lost her appetite for reds entirely. When I mention this to other couples, the nod of recognition is immediate. It’s not just us. And it’s not just parents.
There are a few big forces at work, and they’re all pushing in the same direction:
People are drinking lighter. The wellness trend didn’t kill wine, but it reshaped it. Lower alcohol. Fewer calories. More occasions where a glass of white on the patio at 2pm feels right and a bottle of Barolo doesn’t. The health-conscious drinker isn’t quitting — they’re reaching for something that fits the way they actually live.
Climate is shifting what sounds good. Hotter weather means more of the year where a chilled Albariño or Vinho Verde sounds right and a heavy Cab doesn’t. That might sound trivial, but multiply it across a hundred million wine-drinking occasions a year and it moves markets.
Younger drinkers never got on board. Millennials and Gen Z are choosing sparkling, rosé, canned wine, natural wine, or not drinking at all. They didn’t rebel against red wine — they just never formed the habit. More than two-thirds of French 18-to-24-year-olds say they don’t like red wine. If that’s happening in France, what do you think the numbers look like in the US?
The ritual changed. Red wine was a dinner wine. You opened a bottle with a meal, usually at home. But eating habits changed. People eat out more. They snack instead of sitting down to a three-course dinner. They drink on patios and at picnics and at concerts. Those are white wine and rosé occasions.
What other winemakers are seeing
Digging deeper, I asked people who are actually selling the wine.
Winemaker Nat Wong put it bluntly:
White wines go harder these days. Simple as that. We’re seeing way more demand vs. reds.
Nat Wong, Blade and Talon Wines
Winemaker Thane Hawkins gave me the more complicated version — the one that gets at whether producers are following the market or helping create it:
Partially in response to consumer sentiment, we were already adapting our lineup with the addition of non-traditional wines such as a chillable red, orange wine, and pet nats. So it is a bit hard to tell if this is the tail wagging the dog. But we have definitely seen a consumer shift away from our bolder offerings and toward our lighter bodied reds, whites and these non-traditional offerings.
Thane Hawkins, Hawkins Cellars
That last point is worth sitting with. Thane isn’t sure whether the market moved and producers followed, or producers offered lighter wines and the market took them up on it. Probably both. Either way, the direction is the same.
Anecdotally, I can count more than ten friends and industry colleagues who have shifted their own drinking from mostly red to mostly white in the last few years.
I also know multiple winemakers who bought zero red grapes at all this year, going white-only. On its own that’s anecdote too — but the purchasing data underneath it is not subtle.
What we did about it
When we started Vespera Cellars, we exclusively worked with Pinot Noir on a small vineyard that we farmed. We deliberately avoided buying more Pinot fruit and Cab grapes. We could have — there’s no shortage of available fruit in Washington right now, and the prices have never been lower. But we found the market was craving something lighter, and more unique. For a few vintages with the Pinot fruit, we decided to make Rosé and Pet Nat.
Our first white purchase was this year: Grenache Blanc from Dick Boushey’s vineyard in Yakima. We’ve also worked with unique red varieties like Saperavi, Mourvedre and Graciano.
Looking ahead to future fruit purchases, we will likely lean heavily on white grapes. I’m not saying I’ll never make a Cabernet. I’m saying I wasn’t about to be the thousandth person adding to a pile that the market can’t absorb.
What this means for your wallet
Here’s where it gets interesting. The shift creates two very different realities depending on what you drink — and one of them is the best buying opportunity in years.
If you drink red: congratulations, you’re about to save money
The oversupply in red wine means prices are falling across the board — and not just for bulk wine. I’m seeing Napa Cabs and Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs discounted 20-30%. Some larger Paso Robles Rhône blends are on a fire sale.
This isn’t about bad wine. This is good wine — often very good wine — that nobody’s buying because the market shifted. The grapes are the same. The winemakers are the same. The only thing that changed is demand.
If you have cellar space, this is the time to stock up on reds. Library wines, back vintages, end-of-vintage deals. Producers are sitting on inventory they need to move before the next harvest lands. Many will likely discount — and the same logic applies to wine club subscriptions, where red-heavy allocations are the easiest ones to negotiate on right now.
Regions to look for deals:
- Napa Cabernet is the most oversupplied segment in American wine right now
- Willamette Valley Pinot Noir — especially 2022 and 2023 vintages competing with the incoming 2024s
- Washington reds across the board — Merlot, Cab, Syrah. There is simply too much wine for the number of buyers
- Paso Robles and Central Coast blends, which were already value plays and are now even more so
- Bordeaux Supérieur and Cru Bourgeois — France has the same oversupply problem and these regions are feeling it first
If you want a practical place to start, our Thanksgiving wine guide leans heavily on exactly these categories.
If you drink white: brace yourself
Here’s the other side. While red grapes rot, white wine demand is climbing — and supply isn’t keeping up.
New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, one of the most popular white wines in the world, has had smaller harvests recently. Burgundy Chardonnay has been plagued by frost and hail, keeping supply tight while demand surges. On the Liv-ex exchange, white wine trading has risen roughly 650% by value since 2010, driven largely by white Burgundy — which now accounts for close to 70% of white wine traded there.
Meanwhile, US tariffs on European wine are adding roughly 10–12.5% at the border under the current Section 301 rates. Combine that with a weaker dollar and importers are reporting mid-range European bottles landing 15–25% higher at retail than a year ago. That Sancerre you like? It’s going to cost more. That Chablis? Same. That crisp Italian Vermentino? Also yes.
This is supply and demand doing what it always does. More people want white wine. There isn’t proportionally more white wine to sell. Prices go up.
What to do about it:
- Buy domestic whites — US white wine doesn’t face the same tariff headwinds as European imports, and regions like New York’s Finger Lakes are producing some of the best Riesling in the world.
- Try lesser-known white varieties before they get expensive — Grenache Blanc, Picpoul, Chenin Blanc, Txakoli
- If you love white Burgundy, buy what you can afford now. It is not getting cheaper
“But it’s October” — a fair objection
Granted, this argument is landing at the end of a summer, and it would be easy to read the whole thing as heat-stroke talking. So let me take the objection seriously.
First, the summer genuinely was exceptional. Summer 2026 was the hottest in the 132-year US record — 74.4°F across the lower 48, a full 3°F above the twentieth-century average, beating 1936 and 2021 by four tenths of a degree. August set its own record.
Second, and more to the point: cold weather doesn’t send you back to red by default. If you want a white with some weight behind it, that’s what barrel-fermented and barrel-aged Chardonnay, Viognier, Grenache Blanc and Chenin Blanc are for. These are not gluglu-porch-pounder wines. A well-made white wine with great acid will outlive many reds on your rack, and a serious Chardonnay handles roast chicken or a cream sauce better than a tannic red ever will.
And don’t sleep on bubbles and dessert wine heading into the holidays — sparkling handles a crowded table and a dozen competing dishes better than any still red, which is a big part of why it anchors our Thanksgiving wine guide.
That’s the real argument, and it has nothing to do with the thermometer: white wine is simply more versatile than red. It covers more food, more occasions, more times of day, and more temperatures. Red is wonderful and I will never stop making it or drinking it. It’s just narrower.
Third — and this is the part that makes it structural rather than seasonal — these summers are not an anomaly you wait out. The ten warmest years in the global record have all occurred since 2015. Across fifty large US cities, the EPA counts heat waves rising from an average of two a year in the 1960s to six a year in the 2010s and 2020s, and the heat wave season now runs about 46 days longer than it did in the 1960s. In Napa, a temperature record running from 1958 to 2016 shows the growing season advancing by more than four weeks.
Put plainly: the weather that made a chilled white sound good this August is going to keep showing up. Planting and buying decisions made on the assumption that it won’t are the ones filling those bulk tanks.
The bigger picture
What we’re watching is a generational shift in what the world drinks. It happened slowly and then all at once. Producers who saw it coming — who pivoted to whites, rosé, sparkling or niche varieties — are in decent shape. Producers who doubled down on Cab and Pinot because that’s what always sold are sitting on wine they can’t move.
For the average wine drinker, the takeaway is simple: the market is out of balance, and imbalance creates opportunity. Red wine is cheaper than it’s been in years. White wine is heading the other direction. Act accordingly.
And if you’re one of those people who still loves a big, dark, tannic red? The world just went on sale for you.
Want to understand what’s actually in the glass? Try our free WSET and sommelier practice exams.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Global red wine consumption is down 15% from its 2007 peak, according to the OIV, and white and rose together have overtaken red in worldwide consumption. In France, red wine’s share of supermarket sales dropped from 57% in 2010 to 42% in 2024.
Several factors are driving the decline: lighter drinking preferences, warmer weather making chilled whites more appealing, younger generations not developing red wine habits, a shift toward more casual dining occasions, and a broader wellness trend favouring lower-alcohol options.
Yes. Oversupply in Napa Valley, the Willamette Valley, Washington State and Paso Robles has pushed red wine prices down noticeably.
Signs point to yes. White wine demand is rising while supply is tight in key regions, and US tariffs on European wine are adding roughly 10–12.5% at the border. With a weaker dollar on top, importers report mid-range European bottles landing 15–25% higher at retail. Domestic whites remain the better value for now.
Roughly 37,000 acres came out in 2024, with an estimated 40,000 more expected after the 2025 harvest, against about 20,000 new acres planted each year. California’s 2025 crush of just over 2.6 million tons was the smallest since 1999.
