It’s more expensive than ever to be a wine lover.
A new report shows the average price of a bottle from Napa Valley jumped $17 last year, while tasting fees for visitors to those wineries were 35% higher.
The average bottle from the area now costs over $108. That’s considerably more than its neighbor Sonoma County, which saw an average of $57 per bottle. Don’t expect the prices to get any better, either. Some 71% of the West Coast wineries in the survey said they planned to raise bottle prices again this year.
The numbers come from the 2023 Direct to Consumer Wine Report, which, for years, was conducted by the Silicon Valley Bank wine division. It is the industry’s most trusted data report, but after the collapse of that bank, many were worried it, too, would disappear. First Citizens Bank, however, opted to keep the division running after it took over SVB’s assets.
While visitors to the area are still lower than they were pre-pandemic, the price of a tasting at a Napa vineyard is significantly higher than in the country’s other wine regions. A standard tasting at a Napa winery now goes for $81, $22 more than it did in 2021. A reserve tasting averages $128.
Compare those numbers with $38 for a tasting in Sonoma and $28 in Paso Robles. And to put that in perspective, tasting fees didn’t even exist until the middle- to late-1990s. They hovered around $10 for several years, but as more and more people began going to wineries, those prices began to climb. As recently as 2012, the price of a tasting in Napa was $22.
Wine, overall, is in a bit of a slump. The industry is in its second consecutive year of negative growth, and the SVB report says, “Swift action is required to turn the tide.” The audience is also getting older. While consumers over the age of 60 have continued to grow, people under that age are less interested in buying wine today, the report found.