When Mitch Blakeley joined the family business five years ago, his timing was less than perfect. The pandemic was just beginning. His job was to handle all winery purchases except grapes—bottles, boxes, corks, labels—and shortages and supply-chain snafus sent prices soaring, often making it a challenge even to get the quantities he needed.
“There were times when the situation was so difficult that I was like, ‘Working in the vineyard looks great right now,’” says Blakeley, the fourth generation of Pedroncelli Winery in Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley. “There was a challenge, and it had to be done, and it needed a little bit of grit. A lot of grit.”
That sums up what’s happening to hundreds of California’s multigenerational producers like the Pedroncellis. The past decade has not been kind to family wineries. Matriarch Julie Pedroncelli St. John says it’s the worst she has seen in her 40 years in the business, with the pandemic, a rash of wildfires, inflation, and what seems to be a fundamental shift in Americans’ drinking habits.
But when your family has been successful at something for almost a century, you don’t have many choices…