A daily drive north through Paso Robles offers a sight unusual to the Central Coast’s defining landscape: acre upon acre of vineyards that have been removed from their soil.
“If you drive right now north on the 101, everywhere you look, just ripped out vineyards,” Lucas Childers said.
Childers is a recent Cal Poly agriculture business graduate and agricultural dispatcher for G3 Enterprises. He has worked the past two harvest seasons hauling grapes from vineyards to wineries.
The piles of dead branches are evidence of the wine industry’s steep decline. Since early 2023, the Central Coast has suffered from a decrease in one of their top commodities: wine. An estimated 38,000 acres, or 7% of California vineyards have been destroyed or abandoned, according to the 2025 Standing Winegrape Acreage Report, commissioned by the California Association of Winegrape Growers.
One of the largest wineries based in Gonzalez, about an hour north from Paso Robles, is shutting down this year.
“Other wineries are just dropping like flies, and vineyards as well,” Childers said.
The cellars on the property of Childers’s office recently closed due to reduced demand and tariffs on exports. Childers noted the tonnage of grapes crushed decreased so much each year that the company, Courtside Cellars, decided to shut down completely.
During a good year, Childers would see 70 trailers every night full of grapes traveling from vineyards to wineries. With the industry change, only 30 to 40 trailers are full for the peak two weeks, while the rest of the season stays at 15 to 20.
Wine isn’t on the top shelf with other alcohol trends
The reason for the crisis is a multi-factor situation. A major contributor to the decrease is an overall attitude-change from Gen Z and millennials.
With craft beer and non-alcoholic drinks competing for buyer attention, wine is not with the current trends. The number of young adults reported to drinking alcohol has dropped from 58% to 54% in the last year, according to a Gallup study.
In agreement with his boss at G3, Josh Holman, Childers thinks wine isn’t as approachable for younger generations.
“There’s so much pretentiousness around it,” he said. “Everything has this boutique label, and I’m like, I don’t know what the hell I’m looking at.”
Health trends are also fueling the changes in consumer habits, according to the Gallup trends. “53%, say drinking in moderation, or “one or two drinks a day,” is bad for one’s health,” the study said.
Jenna Childers (unrelated to Lucas Childers), a sales recruiter for Jackson Family Wineries, sees a sober-curious movement among Gen Z and the rise of non-alcoholic mocktail options as a reason to lessen the desire for buying bottles.
“Our generation is drinking less overall. We’re more health focused,” Lucas said. “And, if we’re drinking, we’re usually not going for wine. We’re doing seltzers or mixed drinks, or maybe beer.”
Katherine Reid, a lab harvest intern for Riboli Family Winery has also noted the generational shift. Reid’s father has worked in the wine production business under J. Lohr Wines for years and emphasized the shift in drinking habits.
“There is also a shift in mentality in what we’re drinking, like an uptake in seltzers,” said Reid.
In the 2022-2023 year, a lot of the wine that was produced by Reid’s work went into storage. Rediscovering how wine can be a social drink is the side that Reid would like to see adapt the most.
Too many brands, not enough drinkers
When Jenna first started working in chain sales in the wine industry out of college some 14 years ago, there were 2,300 operating wineries in California.
The restaurant business supported a variety of tastings, and alcohol consumption amongst college aged-people was high. Jenna now works as a recruiter for Kendall-Jackson wineries, the female-owned corporation.
The imbalance of suppliers to distributors is another contributor to the decline in the wine industry, according to Jenna. Over the course of ten years, there have been less distributors, and double the amount of suppliers. Distributors don’t have the bandwidth to sell.
“There has been a lot of chaos within the distributor world,” Jenna said. “After COVID, everyone and their mom is making alcohol. Even Brad Pitt has a brand.”
Both Childers recognize the brand image problems that wine has. “Unless you were raised around wine, you don’t think of it as an actual beverage,” said Jenna. She explained part of the reason the current young adult generation often drifts towards carbonated drinks like craft beer and champagne was caused by the rise of sparkling water and sodas during their childhood.
How will the future of wine change?
Another factor leading to the downwards trend in the market is a decrease in the variety of wines sold. Without such curiosity, the brands that customers know they love thrive, but less variety of wine is being purchased.
“People are drinking alcohol, they are just drinking what they know they like,” Jenna said.
Instead of closing her doors like many businesses, Jenna wants to understand the changing market. She started an internship program in the spring of 2024 to better understand the consumer habits of Gen Z.
“For me, it wasn’t about giving someone a bird’s eye view of Kendall-Jackson Winery, it was literally to learn more about this generation.” she explained.
When Jenna does regular check in calls with her interns after she sends them a tasting, she asks them questions about their experience. She wants to know, what did they talk about during
the tasting, what was the feedback on the wine, did they like the packaging, etc.
Jenna is driven to find the answer to connecting to the new generation of wine drinkers.
“There’s a new space for a new generation, and we need to know how to connect to them,” she said.
One of said interns, communication studies senior Britany Petit, is working on a program to target interest in her college peers.
“When you go to a party, you want a drink that’s conversational,” she said. “It’s easier to walk around with a beer in your hand than a whole bottle of wine.”
Petit’s most recent project was connecting with Cal Poly student athletes at a downtown SLO restaurant for a basketball watch party.
“My main focus is to be an insider investigator into Gen Z and what would actually make us more interested in wine from talking to my peers in real life,” Petit said.
In the future, instead of dead piles of grapevine branches, Lucas wants to see a wine festival take shape in San Luis Obispo Craft, similar to the beer festival. To him, attempting to bridge the gap between the wine industry and catering towards younger people is through a collaborative event.
“That’s kind of one idea to bridge the gap between the industry and our generation, he said. “Not just for Cal Poly kids, for anybody that wants to come and buy a ticket, instead of beer you’re doing wine.”
This story originally appeared in the January printed edition of Mustang News. Check out more stories and the full edition here.
Update, 1:12 p.m. on Jan. 21: A previous version of this story misstated which winery Katherine Reid’s father works at. It has since been corrected.
