Wine grape farmers are setting their fields on fire and selling the land

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In California, a place famous around the world for its viticulture, winemakers produced less wine last year than at any point in the last quarter century. It’s often cheaper to let grapes rot on the vine than to harvest them because so many unsold bottles clog the shelves of storerooms and wine shops. So on a sunny morning in Soledad, Calif., in a valley made famous by the author John Steinbeck, Jason Smith acquiesced to simple economics. A worker unceremoniously drove a tractor and ripped out Mr. Smith’s pinot noir grapes from the ground. Another set fire to the wooden posts that for years had propped up the vines. And Mr. Smith leaned against his white Suburban, under the shade of a coastal oak, watching one of his pinot vineyards go up in smoke.

He had decided to sell all of his land and shut down his family business, which had survived for 51 years. “There’s literally no way for me to make money,” Mr. Smith, 57, said.
Nationwide, wine sales are at their lowest level in more than two decades, as people drink less amid growing public health warnings that alcohol is unhealthy. Sales have also suffered as many younger drinkers have found traditional wines stodgy and difficult to understand, and preferred canned cocktails, seltzers and nonalcoholic beers and spirits.
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