LODI, California — With the start of the weekend comes the start of crowds flocking to the Lodi area tasting rooms.
"Saturdays are our biggest traffic days really," said Layne Montgomery, owner of San Joaquin County's M2 Wines.
Montgomery isn’t just getting ready to see more wine tasters stroll through his San Joaquin County vineyard; he's also getting ready to answer a question that's become common lately.
Instead of ending up in a bottle, hundreds of bunches of his grapes are being left on the ground this season.
"(Visitors) think we're being wasteful or something's wrong," Montgomery said. "It's a move to improve the quality of the wine we make and sell. This vineyard is only 10 years old and when vines are young, they tend to produce a lot, so our vineyard manager and his team come through and they drop the excess fruit so that the remaining grapes will ripen up properly."
Even if growers bottled up the bunches instead of letting them fall on the ground, industry leaders said selling that wine or those grapes would pose another challenge.
"There's a global oversupply of wine and it really started to drive home last harvest when a lot of grapes didn't get picked," said Stuart Spencer, executive director of the Lodi Winegrape Commission. "It's a real challenging situation. The large grape buyers have continued to import millions of gallons of wine from overseas."
The increased imports mean that local growers must lower prices or not sell their grapes at all. Spencer said that despite the challenges at Montgomery's vineyard, other growers are seeing a drop in yields this harvest due to the high summer heat.
Industry leaders are hoping that the natural decrease in production could improve the market.
"The best we can do is ask our customers, ask our community members to support local farms, support local wineries," Spencer said. "Go into the grocery store, ask for local and tell them to send that foreign stuff back overseas."
Montgomery agrees.
"This Zinfandel block... there's probably nine tons of grapes out there, and I don't necessarily need all of them," Montgomery said. "So come and eat some grapes."
Watch more from ABC10: Lodi vineyards struggle amid tough winegrape market
