If the incoming administration keeps its campaign promise to deport millions, the results could devastate California’s wine industry, especially in Napa.
‘Unrecoverable’ and ‘catastrophic’ are words Napa winemakers use to describe the likely outcome of a national crackdown on undocumented farmworkers
Every season, more and more Central Valley wine grapes are harvested by machine. In Lake and Mendocino Counties, growers are getting on board with the cost and efficiency of mechanized grape production. Not so in Napa. Makers of premium Napa wines prefer hand-clipped bunches.
Many top-shelf Napa wines are made from hand-clipped grapesPhoto byMaja PetriconUnsplash
With California roots that go back to the 1970s, Andy Beckstoffer farms grapes on 3,600 acres in three counties. Beckstoffer told the San Francisco Chronicle that his Mendocino and Lake County vineyards are typically machine-picked, but his grapes in Napa Valley are expertly cut from the vine by human hands. Beckstoffer, whose grapes are used to make more than one hundred fine wines, says there’s a stigma attached to machine harvesting, and local vintners simply “won’t do it.”