Lodi Wine & Grape Market Update: Gallo's Crush Suspension Lands on a 26-Year Low
Lodi Wine & Grape Market Update: Gallo's Crush Suspension Lands on a 26-Year Low
LodiEye — June 2026
Summary
E. & J. Gallo Winery's suspension of crush operations at its Turner Road West facility in Lodi — roughly 20 jobs — is a modest event that lands on a stark backdrop. California's 2025 wine grape harvest was the smallest in a generation, and Lodi's District 11 absorbed a steeper decline than the state as a whole. The closure is less a turning point than a marker of where the industry's structural correction now stands. The figures below are reconciled to the Final 2025 California Grape Crush Report released April 30, 2026.
What Gallo Actually Closed
Gallo is suspending crush at Turner Road West — the operation that turns grapes into wine for growers who lack their own production infrastructure. The company framed the move as reflecting “available capacity in our other wineries in the region,” and said affected employees were notified individually and offered transition support, including the chance to pursue other roles within the company.
This is a crush suspension, not a Gallo exit from Lodi. The Turner Road East facility remains open, handling Tetra Pak blending and bottling and finished-goods distribution; Gallo recently added a 200-milliliter Tetra Pak line there. The packaging side is receiving investment even as crush winds down.
The 20-job figure is the crush layoff, not the full site. A National Labor Relations Board filing from April indicates the Lodi facility carried 43 unionized workers (UFCW Local 186D), plus management, cellar, and maintenance staff. The 20 layoffs are specific to the suspended crush function.
Gallo acquired the Turner Road site from Constellation Brands in 2021; the parcels trace back to the former Turner Road Vintners, whose Vendange and Talus labels Constellation's Canandaigua division bought in a $295 million deal in 2001.
A Pattern, Not an Outlier
The Lodi crush suspension is the latest in a sustained Gallo contraction. Earlier in 2026 the company laid off 56 workers at its Ranch Winery in St. Helena, followed by dozens more across properties in Healdsburg and at Frei Ranch — close to 100 Bay Area positions in total. In 2025 Gallo closed its 300,000-square-foot Courtside Cellars winery in San Luis Obispo County.
Gallo is also not the only producer pulling back from Lodi. In January 2026, Healdsburg-based Rack & Riddle — the largest custom sparkling wine producer in the U.S. — announced it would permanently relocate operations from its Lodi facility at 1 Winemaster Way to its Sonoma County headquarters, consolidating into a planned “Sparkling Innovation Park.” That site, purchased from Weibel Family Winery in 2023, was Rack & Riddle's second-largest operation, employing roughly 88 people and producing about 1 million cases of Charmat sparkling wine and in-line carbonation products annually. Sparkling remains the one growth segment in an otherwise shrinking U.S. wine market — yet Lodi still lost the operation to geographic consolidation.
The Data Spine: The 2025 Grape Crush Report
The closures sit on top of hard numbers from the USDA NASS / CDFA California Grape Crush Report for 2025, reconciled here to the Final report released April 30, 2026, rather than the March preliminary.
Statewide
Total crush of all grape types came in at 2,761,914 tons, down 6.1 percent from 2,942,673 tons in 2024. Counting wine varieties alone, the 2025 harvest was 2,626,155 tons — the smallest since 1999 and far below the recent peak of 4.28 million tons in 2018. White wine varieties fell 5.5 percent to 1,324,465 tons; red wine varieties dropped a sharper 11.1 percent to 1,301,690 tons. The statewide average price across all varieties was $977.76 per ton, down 3.9 percent, with red wine grapes averaging $1,280.66 and white wine grapes $706.10. Napa's District 4 again commanded the highest average price at $6,635.85 per ton, and Sonoma's District 3 the second highest at $2,762.88. Industry observers estimate as much as one-fifth of the 2025 crop was never harvested for lack of a buyer.
California Wine Grape Crush, 2016–2025
Source: USDA NASS / CDFA California Grape Crush Report, Final 2025 Crop (total wine-type tonnage, in thousands of tons).
The 2025 wine-grape total is effectively tied with 1999 for the lowest in a quarter-century, and it sits roughly 39 percent below the 2018 high. The line tells the structural story behind the Gallo and Rack & Riddle decisions: this is not a one-year weather dip but a multi-year contraction in how much fruit California processors are willing to crush. Lodi did not escape it — it felt the pressure more acutely than the state overall.
District 11 (Lodi)
The CDFA's District 11 — San Joaquin County north of Highway 4 and Sacramento County south of Highway 50, east of Interstate 5 — crushed 532,409 tons in 2025, a decline that ran well ahead of the statewide drop, with independent analyses putting the district's contraction near 11 percent. Table 6 of the Final report puts the district's weighted-average grower return at $585.58 per ton — a slight upward revision from the $580.12 in the March preliminary release — ranking 14th among the 17 pricing districts. Only Districts 12 ($481.54), 13 ($333.73), and 14 ($290.87) ranked lower. For comparison, District 13 (the Madera and Fresno region) posted the largest single-district share at 802,609 tons on that $333.73 average, while Napa's District 4 led the state at $6,635.85.
The price ranking understates Lodi's actual production role. District 11 still leads California in the tonnage of several major varieties:
| Variety | District 11 tons (2025, Final) | Statewide rank |
|---|---|---|
| Cabernet Sauvignon | 132,681 | #1 in state |
| Pinot Gris | 59,524 | #1 in state |
| Sauvignon Blanc | 39,418 | #1 in state |
| Merlot | 33,069 | #1 in state |
| Petite Sirah | 26,184 | #1 in state |
The district is also a heavyweight in two varieties it doesn't quite lead: it crushed 86,880 tons of Chardonnay (second to District 13's 89,893) and 51,631 tons of Zinfandel (second to District 13's 59,095). A handful of varieties make up the bulk of Lodi's crush.
District 11 Top Crushed Varieties, 2025
Source: USDA NASS / CDFA California Grape Crush Report, Final 2025 Crop, Table 2 (tons crushed, District 11). Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Gris, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot, and Petite Sirah lead the state; Chardonnay and Zinfandel rank second.
In other words, Lodi remains a volume backbone of California wine even as the price it commands per ton sits near the bottom of the state's districts — the structural squeeze that drives the current contraction.
The Supply Correction Underway
Growers are responding the only way an oversupplied commodity market allows: by taking vines out of the ground. The Land IQ / California Association of Winegrape Growers acreage assessment found that as of August 1, 2025, District 11 had removed 8,083 acres since October 2024, leaving 82,646 standing acres. Statewide, 38,134 acres came out over the same window, leaving 477,475 standing.
Even that pace is widely viewed as insufficient. Lodi Winegrape Commission Executive Director Stuart Spencer has said at least 15,000 acres should come out of the Lodi AVA for the industry's economic health, and Allied Grape Growers president Jeff Bitter has projected roughly 40,000 more acres of statewide removals ahead. Lodi District Grape Growers Association president Amy Blagg notes that declining consumption and excess winery inventory have left fruit on the vine, with growers fallowing land or shifting to alternative crops including almonds, olives, and row crops.
What's Driving It
The demand side explains the supply pain. U.S. and global wine consumption continues to slide, led by lighter drinking among younger generations; cheap bulk imports have undercut domestic growers on price; and the result has been a historic grape surplus that the market is now grinding down through removals and closures. Spencer has characterized current conditions bluntly as “a bloodbath for all grape growers across California.”
The Lodi Read
For Lodi specifically, three things are worth holding together. First, the contraction is real and measurable — a double-digit local crush decline and a per-ton price that ranks 14th of 17 districts. Second, the closures are concentrated on the crush and consolidation side, not on Lodi's underlying growing capacity, which still leads the state in five major varieties and retains a packaging investment at Turner Road East. Third, the correction is deliberate: the removals, the suspensions, and the consolidations are the mechanism by which a structurally oversupplied region resets toward balance. Whether 15,000 acres is enough — and how much of Lodi's old-vine heritage survives the cut — is the open question the next two crush cycles will answer.
LodiEye is the investigative research arm of Lodi411.com, a citizen-run civic data and transparency platform serving Lodi, California and San Joaquin County. LodiEye is not a traditional news outlet. It does not employ professional journalists or reporters, and the people behind it do not hold journalism degrees or have professional newsroom experience. LodiEye is best understood as civic research and analysis — not peer journalism — and is not a substitute for the local and regional news organizations that do this work professionally. For traditional reporting on Lodi, San Joaquin County, and the broader region, readers are encouraged to consult the Lodi News-Sentinel, Stocktonia, The Sacramento Bee, CalMatters, and other established news outlets staffed by credentialed journalists.
This LodiEye market update was produced using artificial intelligence tools under the direction and review of the founder. Lodi411 uses multiple AI platforms in its research and publication workflow, including Anthropic's Claude (primarily Opus and Sonnet models) and Perplexity AI across a variety of large language models offered by each. For this report, Anthropic's Claude (Opus) was the primary tool. These tools were used in the following capacities:
Source Discovery: AI-assisted search and retrieval located coverage of the Gallo Turner Road crush suspension and the Rack & Riddle relocation, and fetched the USDA NASS / CDFA Final 2025 California Grape Crush Report directly so the analysis would work from the primary dataset rather than secondary news summaries.
Credibility Validation: Figures were cross-referenced against the primary CDFA crush data and reconciled against the March preliminary release, prioritizing government datasets over news reporting. Statewide totals and average prices that appeared in secondary coverage were corrected where they conflicted with the Final report, and District 11 tonnage was verified line by line from the report's district tables.
Analysis and Synthesis: Claude Opus assisted in situating the Gallo closure within the statewide crush decline and the local vineyard-removal data, and in distinguishing crush-side consolidation from Lodi's underlying growing capacity.
Presentation: Claude Opus assisted in drafting, structuring, and formatting the report, including the ten-year statewide crush-trend chart and the District 11 leading-variety table.
Final Review: Key figures were re-checked against the primary report, including pulling Table 6 directly to confirm the District 11 weighted-average grower return ($585.58 per ton, 14th of 17 districts) and reconcile it against the March preliminary figure. Multi-tool cross-checking against the primary dataset is the actual error-reduction mechanism, and errors can still arise from model output, source data, or oversight. All editorial judgments, analytical conclusions, and publication decisions were made by the founder.
Lodi411/LodiEye believes transparency about AI use serves both readers and the broader information ecosystem. Readers who spot errors are encouraged to write editor@lodi411.com so corrections can be made.
References
- Wine Business — “GALLO to Suspend Crush Operations at Turner Road in Lodi” (June 5, 2026)
- Lodi News-Sentinel — “Gallo to shutter Turner Road West crush operations in Lodi”
- USDA NASS / CDFA — California Grape Crush Report, Final 2025 Crop (April 30, 2026); Tables 1, 2, and 6
- CBS Sacramento — Rack & Riddle to leave Lodi facility for Sonoma County (January 21, 2026)
- CDFA — Grape Crush Report program and archive
- California Association of Winegrape Growers — Grape Crush Report resources
Questions or corrections: editor@lodi411.com · Lodi411.com