California's wine industry is in decline as people are drinking less alcohol than past generations, leaving vineyards with too much supply and not enough demand. Experts are recommending ripping out 50,000 acres of vines, more than 8% of all the vineyards left in #California. #news #wine #alcohol #drinking #drink #vineyard #grapes #genz #eyeonamerica

It's 60 acres this year. Usually, the grapes growing in Garrett Schaefer's California vineyard are destined to become fine wines, but not this year. Your grapes are literally dying here on the vine. These things aren't going to get harvested. No, they're turning to raisins. They'll just end up falling off. 50 acres, 400 tons of grapes have been left to rot here as a result of too much supply and not enough demand. As sales of wine continue a downward slide. An equivalent of 3.5 billion bottles of wine was not drunk last year. It's a big number. A number Schaefer blames on inflation. The price of a liter of wine rose more than 13% in just the last five years. Sales took a hit this year after the World Health Organization declared no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health. Orange bitters. And there's a generation of young people who just aren't drinking wine as much as the baby boomers. I, over time, really realized that drinking wine regularly was not sitting super well with me. Brianda Gonzalez has shied away from traditional wine. My dad's a bartender by trade, but a few years ago he got sick. So that meant alcohol had to be cut out. So I went down this whole rabbit hole of non-alcoholic drinks and became fascinated by the category. Her preference now? Non-alcoholic beverages, which she sells at her shops in California. Sarah Chacon and her sister Helen are among the steady stream of customers. I do not drink wine. I've actually never been a big fan of wine, but I do like an alternative. Do you find that you're drinking less these days? Yeah. Why is that? Yeah, just for health reasons. In California, where 80% of the country's wine grapes are grown, the impact is dramatic. Here's a sight no wine lover wants to see, heavy machines ripping row upon row of vines straight from the ground. That tractor cutting these can do about 30 acres a day. For more than 50 years, Don Wortley built his business around weeding out diseased vines. These days, growers hire him to clear their fields. What did it cost this man? $20,000 an acre, perhaps? Now he's throwing it away? You see what this looks like here, with what happened here, 10 acres. Yeah, so this was 10 acres that we pulled out this year. We didn't farm it, and we couldn't sell it. Altogether, Schaefer ripped out 60 acres, one third of all the vineyards his family farmed since 1894. Gone, too, are people who work this land. We used to have, you know, six to eight full-time employees through the year. We're down to two of us. And may well get worse. Experts recommend 33,000 more acres. 6% of all the vineyards left in California be ripped out. It's a new reality here, far more painful than simply sour grapes. For Eye on America, I'm Elizabeth Cook in Lodi, California.