Abstract
Among countries, the United States is the world’s fourth largest producer of wine and the largest consumer and importer. The industry is located primarily on the US west coast, and California alone accounts for four-fifths of production. It is a diverse industry in terms of the varieties grown, farm size, yield, fruit attributes and price, and ultimately value of the wine produced, attributes that have a strong relationship with the geographic location of production. The current complex taxation structure and peculiar “three-tier” wine marketing and distribution system owe much to the legacy of Prohibition. Effectively, each state is a separate entity, and they can differ significantly in their regulations and taxes applicable to wine marketing and distribution, performed by an increasingly concentrated industry. These features may be daunting to some suppliers. Nonetheless, growth in population and per capita demand continue to drive changes in production, markets, and imports in this vibrant sector of the US economy.
The work for this project was partly supported by the University of California Agricultural Issues Center and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture, under award number 2011-51181-30635 (the VitisGen project). The authors are grateful for this support and for excellent research assistance provided by Jarrett Hart. Views expressed are the authors’ alone.
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Areas of vines and cropland for 2016 in this paragraph are estimated based on areas in 2012, the most recent census for which data are available at the time of writing.
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The term “removed” here refers to removal of the product from a bonded warehouse, as it enters commerce and, if it is destined for domestic sale, incurs excise tax.
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Lapsley, J.T., Alston, J.M., Sambucci, O. (2019). The US Wine Industry. In: Alonso Ugaglia, A., Cardebat, JM., Corsi, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Wine Industry Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98633-3_5
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