Could the Napa earthquake make wines more expensive?

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Aug 27, 2014

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Could the Napa earthquake make wines more expensive?

Several Napa Valley wineries sustained damages from the earthquake this weekend, raising questions about the longer-term impact on the wine market.

A worker stacks cases of Charles Shaw wine at the Bronco Wine Company facility in Napa, Calif., Tuesday, April 17, 2007. 55,000 cases a day are coming out of this Napa Valley bottling plant, more than some upscale wineries make in a year. And it's owned not by some blue-blooded purveyor of high-end reds but by Fred Franzia, famous for Two Buck Chuck and the ten bucks taboo, as in: No wine is worth more than $10.

Several Napa Valley wineries sustained damages from the earthquake this weekend, raising questions about the longer-term impact on the wine market.

Business is now getting back to normal in Napa Valley after the magnitude 6.0 earthquake this weekend. Wineries and wine shops are still assessing the damage and the costs, raising the question: Could those costs be passed on to consumers in the form of higher wine prices?

W. Blake Gray, California editor of the online wine magazine Wine Searcher, says that while the earthquake was a catastrophe for some individual wineries, it's unlikely to have much of an impact on the overall wine market because it happened at a very fortunate time in the harvesting season.