A downturn in the grape market due to oversupply and sagging demand is testing the survival of some Niagara County growers, according to Mike Schweitzer, president of the Niagara Wine Trail and Bella Rose Vineyard & Winery in Lewiston.
“I know farmers that are just leaving it on their fields this year,” Schweitzer said of grape crops. “It costs too much to pick for it to not have anywhere to go. The price of glass for bottles, corks, and the staff to make the wine — it costs more than it makes in the end.”
Ann Schulze, owner of Schulze Vineyard & Winery in Burt, added to the list of expenses. “The cost of spraying and trimming the grapes, the cost of picking the grapes with a harvester which takes gas, and the cost of trucking the grapes have all gone up,” Schulze said. “We only sell part of our Niagaras to a juice company in Dunkirk. We’re limited to the amount of grapes we can sell to them and the price of the grapes is not good.”
“I think that Niagara in particular has been hurt by the drop in tourism from Canada,” said Sam Filler, executive director of the New York Wine & Grape Foundation.
Andrew Holden, business management extension educator for the Lake Erie Regional Grape Program, said there is currently a global oversupply of grape juice.
“At the same time, post-Covid, there’s been a decrease in the demand,” Holden said. “They’re ripping out tens of thousands of acres in Europe and California. A lot of the experts say that if we want to get to more equilibrium, more acres will have to come out. Locally, we’re feeling that global squeeze.”
For the local juice market, Holden said purple Concord grapes are the most widely grown, with light-colored Niagara grapes coming in second and Catawba in some vineyards.
“Our region is the largest Concord region in the world. A good chunk of our juice grapes go into our wine making,” he said. “The price of juice grapes has gone down in the last couple of years because of the global glut. The other thing that the Concord growers are facing, too, is adherence to people wanting less sugar. Juice specifically has been hailed as high sugar, and I think that contributes to people not drinking juice.”
Holden said with harvest finishing, now prices are being reported. “We’re down, I would say, across the board on average,” he said. “It’s really kind of a situation that’s compounded because last year we had an oversupply and people grew the same amount. Things start backing up and all of these processors get to the point to where they’re not selling as many gallons of juice as they used to. That’s when you start hearing of people’s contracts being dropped or their payments coming late.”
For Niagara’s small winemakers, Schweitzer said national and state dynamics have the most impact.
“We’re too small to be affected by exports,” he said. “For us, it has more to do with the shift in the consumer. The wholesale market was the first thing to bottom out, last year with a 20% reduction, and this year with another 20% reduction.”
Meanwhile, larger wineries in the county are able to bring in cheaper grapes from Washington and process them locally, Schweitzer said. The door to out-of-state grapes flung open two years ago, he said, when the state provided relief to growers after heavy Concord losses along Lake Erie.
Schweitzer said New York State allowed processors and winemakers who had used Concord grapes in recent years to purchase nearly any type of grape from out of state and still label the bottle as New York wine. This also allowed New York winemakers not affected by the severe freeze to bring in grapes.
“It’s cheaper labor in other states, cheaper taxes in other states,” Schweitzer said. “That’s when I started seeing farmers leaving stuff on the vine. The state tried to help on that one and they didn’t do it right.”
Changing consumer preferences also made a large impact. “A lot of conversations I hear is that there’s just so much choice out on the market now, when you start thinking about all the seltzers, all the beers and ciders,” Holden said.
“The consumer just isn’t going to liquor stores and buying wine,” Schweitzer said. “It’s because of the introduction of marijuana, and everyone drying out from Covid when people stayed home and had a couple of drinks.”
Marijuana has been so embraced by consumers that the multi-year National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that by 2022, daily or near-daily use of marijuana had shot up while the daily or near-daily consumption of alcohol fell. Other studies show that marijuana use is increasingly viewed as a lower-risk activity than drinking.
“Marijuana is doing a good job of showing that there are benefits to that,” Schweitzer said. “People aren’t going out in groups like they used to. They’re doing a Netflix-and-chill thing at home. The idea of socializing has changed.”
“The challenge that the industry faces now is how to talk about wine to younger generations,” Filler said. “There’s research that multi-cultural consumers have an interest in wine. I don’t know how many wine ads you see put in the context of Asian food. You’ve got to put it into the context of what consumers are familiar with.”