I tried to get Esther to be a Guest Speaker at a SFTGG General Meeting last year. But, she was pedal to the metal with a newborn, writing a book, etc.
By Esther Mobley, Senior Wine Critic March 6, 2026
The changes to California wine over the past decade have been monumental.
When I joined the Chronicle in 2015 to cover the beat, wine in America felt ascendant. I arrived in the middle of a decade during which California retail wine sales within the U.S. ballooned from $30 billion in 2010 to $47 billion in 2020, according to the Wine Institute, a nearly 57% jump. The beverage finally seemed to be shedding its reputation as an obsession for snobs, and — thanks in no small part to a new wave of boundary-pushing winemakers from California — was instead becoming a worthwhile interest for people of all stripes.
No one could have known it at the time, but the wine industry was approaching the end of innocence. Soon, Wine Country would be forced to confront the era of mega wildfires. Climate change would threaten to alter the flavor of our wines. The rise of natural wine would lead to an ideological clash between the industry’s establishment and its avant-garde. Consumers would start to feel that California wine — and, in particular, the experience of visiting Napa Valley — was just too expensive.
Then, of course, the pandemic and its aftermath would fundamentally alter the way our society interacts with alcohol, leading to a downturn in wine consumption and an industry crisis that will by now sound deeply familiar to even a casual reader of this newspaper.
As I depart from my role as the Chronicle’s wine critic, I’ve been reflecting on this extraordinary transformation over the last decade-ish in California wine. Here’s what I see as the period’s major inflection points.
The moments that have defined California wine over the last 10 years
Greg
Quick and Dirty
The changes to California wine over the past decade have been monumental.
When I joined the Chronicle in 2015 to cover the beat, wine in America felt ascendant. I arrived in the middle of a decade during which California retail wine sales within the U.S. ballooned from $30 billion in 2010 to $47 billion in 2020, according to the Wine Institute, a nearly 57% jump. The beverage finally seemed to be shedding its reputation as an obsession for snobs, and — thanks in no small part to a new wave of boundary-pushing winemakers from California — was instead becoming a worthwhile interest for people of all stripes.
No one could have known it at the time, but the wine industry was approaching the end of innocence. Soon, Wine Country would be forced to confront the era of mega wildfires. Climate change would threaten to alter the flavor of our wines. The rise of natural wine would lead to an ideological clash between the industry’s establishment and its avant-garde. Consumers would start to feel that California wine — and, in particular, the experience of visiting Napa Valley — was just too expensive.
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Then, of course, the pandemic and its aftermath would fundamentally alter the way our society interacts with alcohol, leading to a downturn in wine consumption and an industry crisis that will by now sound deeply familiar to even a casual reader of this newspaper.
As I depart from my role as the Chronicle’s wine critic, I’ve been reflecting on this extraordinary transformation over the last decade-ish in California wine. Here’s what I see as the period’s major inflection points.
Rosé wine improved in quality in the early 2010s, but then its viral popularity resulted in a wave of boring wines engineered for Instagram.
Benjamin Fanjoy/For the S.F. Chronicle
2015: Rosé went viral
Remember when the wine industry’s biggest controversies revolved around obnoxious rosé hashtags? Yes Way Rosé, Rosé All Day, Drink Pink, Brosé. This was peak rosé craze, the culmination of pink wine transforming from something saccharine and tacky (Sutter Home white Zinfandel) to dry and classy (Whispering Angel). The shift in quality in the aughts and early 2010s was legitimately exciting, but by 2015 rosé had gotten too popular for its own good — people saw it less as a wine and more as a beach accessory. Its dominance on Instagram (especially the celebrity-founded White Girl Rosé brand) would turn out to be an early precursor of the social-media influencer era: Now, wine content would be reaching a wider than ever audience, but the content, like many of the made-for-Instagram rosé brands, was frequently trash.
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Read: Rosé goes viral. Is that a bad thing?
Arnot-Roberts and Ceritas, seen at 1760 restaurant in San Francisco in 2016, were among the new generation of sought-after wines in that era.
Liz Hafalia/S.F. Chronicle
2016: The new cult wines
In the ’90s, Napa Valley’s so-called “cult Cabernets” changed the game. This exclusive set — Harlan, Screaming Eagle, Colgin, Bryant, Araujo, Grace and Dalla Valle — produced ultra-expensive wine in ultra-scarce quantities. By 2016, however, the fever had broken. Although the cult Cabs still enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) an audience, the zeitgeist had moved on from those wines’ luscious, full-bodied richness to an entirely new flavor. This era’s trophy wines — Arnot-Roberts, Ceritas, Dirty & Rowdy, Sandlands and Ultramarine — were mostly from Sonoma County, not Napa; were far less expensive; prized lower alcohol levels; embraced a wide range of grape varieties, not just Cab; and had a scrappy, approachable feel, a far cry from the exclusivity that the original cults had cultivated. Unlike the cult Cabs, which had all been fairly similar in profile, these wines occupied the full flavor spectrum. It marked a sea change in California wine style.
Read: California’s new generation of sought-after wines
Flames consumed one of the buildings at Signorello Estate in Napa Valley in October 2017.
Noah Berger/For the S.F. Chronicle
2017: Wildfires came for Wine Country
California has always been acquainted with fire. But the cluster of wildfires that erupted in Napa and Sonoma counties in 2017 — including the Tubbs Fire, which wiped out entire neighborhoods of Santa Rosa, and was at the time the most destructive wildfire in the state’s history — signaled a new, disturbing normal. A handful of wineries, including Signorello, White Rock and Paradise Ridge, were mostly or entirely destroyed. This was the year when people really started worrying about smoke taint, the phenomenon whereby wildfire smoke can impart unpleasant and irradicable flavors into wine grapes (even if no one yet had any good answers about how to address the problem). In retrospect, however, the 2017 fires’ impacts on the wine industry would come to look relatively minor compared with what the subsequent years would bring.
Read: Hope in Wine Country as vineyards assess the long-term economic impact of the wildfires
Vintner Randy Dunn, seen at his Howell Mountain vineyard in 2018, was one of the most outspoken proponents of Measure C.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
2018: Land-use issues divided Napa Valley
The 50th anniversary of the Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve — the first land-preservation effort of its kind in the country — happened to coincide with a highly controversial ballot measure in the county in 2018. Ostensibly, Measure C asked voters whether wineries should be limited in their ability to cut down oak trees in order to plant vineyards. But really, it was about much more: Had Napa Valley planted so many vineyards that its vintners were actually harming the natural environment? Does agriculture constitute a protection of the land, or a devastation of it? These arguments weren’t new for Napa, but Measure C (which ultimately failed at the ballot box) brought them to the fore in an unprecedented way.
Read: Battle for Napa Valley’s future: Proposed curb on vineyards divides county
Dan Petroski, then the winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards in Calistoga, undertook an experiment to plant grape varieties other than Cabernet Sauvignon in 2019.
Liz Hafalia/S.F. Chronicle
2019: A reckoning with climate change
By 2019, progressive-minded California wineries were thinking hard about how climate change was affecting their wines — and now, many vintners began interrogating the basic tenets of modern viticulture. In Napa Valley, a few outspoken winemakers audaciously questioned whether Cabernet Sauvignon could really remain the region’s cash crop forever, arguing that warming temperatures could soon push it into a zone where it might no longer taste good. Wineries such as Spottswoode and Larkmead began planting heat-tolerant grape varieties — including Portuguese grapes like Touriga Nacional or Spanish ones like Tempranillo — as experiments, moves that seemed controversial at the time but have since become much more common.
Read: Napa wineries confront climate change by planting new experimental vineyards
A fire burns at Robert Craig Winery in Napa Valley during the Glass Fire in 2020.
Brittany Hosea-Small/For the S.F. Chronicle
2020: Wildfires, wildfires, wildfires
As if 2020 weren’t bad enough for the obvious reason, the year proved to be downright apocalyptic in Wine Country, with a series of fires that would in some ways change the course of the California wine industry. Dry lightning strikes throughout the state hit at the beginning of harvest, rendering many grapes smoke tainted before the season even started; a month later, the devastating Glass Fire destroyed or damaged more than 30 Napa Valley wineries. The impact on grapes was so widespread that many wineries decided not to produce or release any wine at all from the 2020 vintage. The disasters prompted a wave of new research into smoke taint and wildfire prevention for wineries.
Read: Catastrophic Glass Fire marks new, dangerous era for Napa wine industry
Emme Wines owner Rosalind Reynolds, seen in 2021 in Sebastopol, is one of the top producers of zero-zero wine in California.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
2021: Natural wine hit the big time
The natural wine movement had been gaining momentum in the Bay Area for several years, but by 2021 it had established itself as a formidable presence. In certain neighborhoods of San Francisco and Oakland, it no longer felt niche; it was the default. Every new wine bar that opened, it seemed, was a natural wine bar, and suddenly many (including Bar Part Time, which opened in 2021) served exclusively zero-zero wines — the most extreme arm of natural wine, in which nothing is added or taken away during the winemaking process. Natural wine has continued to operate like a wedge issue, provoking strong reactions among many in the wine industry’s mainstream, but there was no denying its sway in the region’s larger culture or the influence it was already having on the winemaking establishment.
Read: There’s wine. There’s natural wine. Then there’s ‘zero-zero’ wine
Wine Country tasting rooms, such as Smith Story Wines in Healdsburg, experienced a surprisingly slow summer in 2022.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
2022: Wine tasting got too expensive
The summer of 2022 was unusually slow in Napa and Sonoma, with far fewer tourists than the region was accustomed to seeing during peak season. In the moment, the culprit seemed obvious: cost. The average price of a hotel room in Yountville that summer was $934, a $200 jump from 2021. In Napa Valley, $500 tastings weren’t unheard of. All that kept many would-be Wine Country visitors home — though, in hindsight, the drop in tourism was almost certainly also an early omen of the wine-consumption downturn to come.
Read: Why is Wine Country tourism so slow? ‘You’re out a few thousand dollars before you walk into a winery’
Rombauer Vineyards in St. Helena, famous for its Chardonnay, sold to Gallo in 2023.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
2023: White wine reigned supreme
Sales of red wine reliably outpaced those of white wine in the U.S. throughout the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s. But as drinkers gradually shifted toward lighter, fresher styles (see: the earlier rosé craze), white wine became dominant. By May 2023, according to Nielsen, it represented nearly 49% of still wine sales volume, as opposed to red wine’s 45%. This trend was borne out in the year’s two most eye-catching acquisitions: Gallo, the country’s largest wine company, acquired Massican and Rombauer. In some ways, the pair couldn’t be more different — Massican was an artisanal line of cerebral, Italian-inspired whites; Rombauer, a behemoth that defined the California style of buttery, toasty Chardonnay — but they shared one key trait, being known for white wines.
Read: Napa Valley icon Rombauer Vineyards sold to wine giant and Buzzy Napa winery sells to America’s largest wine company
Megan Bell, owner of Margins Wine, was among the first California winemakers to speak out about the industry’s unfolding crisis in 2024. Margins has since gone out of business.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
2024 to present: It all came crashing down
The story of the last two years has been clear and unrelenting: People are drinking less. Global alcohol consumption has cratered, creating a domino effect in a sprawling, multibillion-dollar industry. Wineries are closing, vineyards are being pulled out, people are losing their jobs. The U.S. wine industry has seen downturns before, but never like this.
So far, the industry doesn’t seem to know how to respond to this unfolding crisis. Although there have been efforts to rebrand wine — for example, as a balm for loneliness — the most likely scenario may be simply a contraction of the overall industry. If there are fewer wine drinkers, there must be less wine.
Read: California wine is in serious trouble
Where does California wine go from here? Regardless of what the market-analytics reports say, there are some encouraging signs. Quality has never been higher. The state’s winemakers are producing a wider array of styles and grape varieties than ever before, adapting their winemaking to a changing climate — in some cases, shifting their farming practices in an attempt to mitigate some of climate change’s harshest effects. It’s a hard time to be a California winemaker. But there’s never been a better time to be a California wine drinker.