Who will save the U.S. wine industry? Not California boomers.

A pleasant way to while away a few minutes (or hours if you’re really into it) is to visit the American Viticultural Area Map Explorer hosted by the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Trade and Tax Bureau, aka the TTB.

The greatest concentration of these official wine regions — the easier-going cousins of France’s appellations d’origine controlee — is, not surprisingly, in California. So is the most famous one, the Napa Valley American Viticultural Area. But most other states now have them, too.

The biggest appears to be the Ozark Mountains AVA, which covers about 55,000 square miles (142,000 square kilometers) in Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma; the smallest is reputedly the Cole Ranch AVA in California’s Mendocino County, which is less than a quarter of a square mile and is owned in its entirety by a guy named Mike.

The oldest is the Augusta AVA in the western exurbs of St. Louis, which was established in June 1980, two years after the Treasury Department finalized the rule creating the designations and seven months before Napa Valley got the nod. The newest is the Contra Costa AVA in the eastern suburbs of San Francisco, established this month. There’s an Ulupalakua AVA on the island of Maui, a Texoma AVA on the Texas-Oklahoma border, a Tip of the Mitt AVA in Michigan and a Martha’s Vineyard AVA off the coast of Massachusetts. And so on.

Some of these wine regions have surprisingly long histories — did you know that the wine industry in Kentucky, a large swath of which is now in the Ohio River Valley AVA, dates to 1798 and was the country’s third largest before the Civil War? (I did not before reading this article.) But mostly they’re evidence of wine’s great rise in popularity in the U.S. over the past 50 years or so. What had been a niche beverage at mid-century became the signature drink of the gigantic baby-boom generation, so much so that per capita U.S. consumption even seemed to follow the boomers’ life cycle — rising rapidly in their young-adult years, falling as they had kids, then going back up again as the kids grew up and moved out.

As you may have heard, the baby boomers are now getting kind of old (the youngest turn 60 this year, the eldest 78), and while the first two years of the pandemic did bring new wine-consumption records in the U.S., those appear to have been anomalies. Per capita consumption fell back to roughly 2015’s level in 2022 and almost certainly declined again in 2023.

As Rob McMillan of Silicon Valley Bank (yes, it lives on, as a division of North Carolina’s First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company) has been pointing out for years in his excellent annual State of the U.S. Wine Industry reports, each of the U.S. age cohorts that has the followed the baby boom has been less into wine than the previous one. The wine slump is even more pronounced globally, with total (that is, not per capita) consumption down 7% since peaking in 2007.

But while California has cut wine production almost 20% over the past decade in the face of this weakening demand as well as multiple droughts and wine-country wildfires, the rest of the country has been planting more vineyards. California’s share of U.S. wine production, around 90% in the 1990s and 2000s, dropped below 80% for the first time on record in 2022, and while it bounced back slightly in 2023 data released by the TTB this month, the trend appears pretty clear.

It’s even clearer when you look at employment, with non-California wineries on track to surpass California’s in jobs soon.

One way to look at these statistics — to be honest, the way I looked at them at first — is that less-sophisticated winemakers outside of California are gearing up to meet demand that just isn’t going to exist. But it’s also possible to see it as a sensible rebalancing of where wine is made in the face of climate change, high California land and labor costs and shifts in how wine is sold.

The top winemaking states outside of California are New York and Washington. New York has long been home to big wine brands such as the kosher Kedem and Manischewitz and the once-highflying Taylor Wine, but their heyday has passed and the state has only recently become known for higher-end wines. Washington has built the wine industry most similar to California’s, with a full range of supermarket brands and premium wines. But recent industry growth has almost all been elsewhere (I’ve highlighted the states where production has more than doubled since 2012, the first year for which TTB reports the data).

It’s helpful to view these production shifts in the context of the shifting ways in which wine is bought and sold. Wine sales have been falling at the low end and increasing at price points of $12 and up. At the mostly smaller, almost exclusively West Coast wineries that Silicon Valley Bank serves, prices tend to be a lot higher than that — with a $39 median price per bottle for their wine club sales in 2022 — and the selling channels chiefly direct.

With sales growth mainly in premium wines and tasting rooms and wine clubs responsible for most of premium wineries’ revenue it seems clear why winemaking keeps expanding outside California. Wineries need to be closer to where consumers live.

It also helps to have a good climate and soil for wine grapes. Oregon owes more of its spectacular wine-production boom of the past decade to how well-suited its Willamette Valley is to growing Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris than to its 27th-in-the-nation population. But the states that SVB’s McMillan told me have the most potential to join California, Washington and Oregon as top premium-wine players — New York and Virginia first, followed by Texas — all happen to have lots of people too.

There is a risk that the focus on high-end wines and direct sales will eventually turn out to be a dead end. If younger consumers never develop a taste for wine in the first place, they’re not going to head to the local winery to shell out $500 for a case. But labor costs are lower outside California — with an average weekly wage at non-California wineries of $656 in the third quarter of 2023 compared with $1,372 in California — and land costs usually are, too, so there’s at least an opportunity to create a less steep on-ramp.

"By producing lower-priced craft wine from a family farm, half of the battle of getting a consumer to sample wine is solved,” McMillan said in an email when I asked him about this. "The work I’ve done has shown younger consumers are more willing to wade into the complex premium wine world when the entry price is lower.”

The entry price isn’t always lower outside California — the more ambitious wineries of Texas and Virginia charge quite a lot and I was a little surprised while exploring online to find $100 bottles for sale at wineries in Arizona, New Mexico and North Carolina. Still, there are lots of cheaper bottles out there, too, and it’s not unreasonable to think that next big idea in how to sell wine to young adults is more likely to come from a Gen Z winemaker or marketer in, say, the Texas Hill Country AVA near Austin or the Dahlonega Plateau AVA north of Atlanta than a boomer in Napa Valley.