The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is offering up to $1 billion of financial aid to American producers of certain specialty crops, including growers of wine grapes, through its new Assistance for Specialty Crop Farmers (ASCF) program. Per USDA’s recent press release, the goal of the ASCF...

When a Washington winery transitions to Shopify POS, the visible experience in the tasting room doesn’t change dramatically. Guests are still welcomed. Wine is still poured. Bottles are still sold. What changes is operational structure. For many wineries in WA, POS, ecommerce, wine club management,...

A question I’ve been thinking about lately: Do your tasting room systems actually work together, or do they just coexist? For many small WA wineries, the setup feels fine on the surface. You launch ecommerce. You add a POS. You manage your clubs. You run reports. Sure everything functions. But a...

An exceptionally small 2025 grape harvest would help balance wine inventories and potentially stimulate grape demand next year There wasn’t much change in the complexion of the wine market in the third quarter. Sales continued to decline across channels and price points, though at varying rates....

Napa, CA (January 6, 2026) – Dickenson Peatman & Fogarty (DP&F) is pleased to announce that attorney Tracy Genesen, former Vice President and General Counsel for Wine Institute, has joined the firm’s Alcohol Beverage Law and Compliance (ABLC) practice group. Tracy is internationally recognized for...

A pause in the fever dream of instability October arrived not with fanfare but with something rarer: Quiet. After a year of collective anticipation for more and more problems, what occurred was a respite. The tariffs are stalled, and the early indications from the Supreme Court suggest they are...

It’s no secret that people are drinking less. The consistent, downward trends in alcohol consumption are presenting significant challenges to the wine industry, which is already having to operate in a complex, competitive marketplace. In order to dissect what is happening in the world of wine and...

Price-sensitive consumers have kept a lid on wine sales this year, while grape sales are likely to remain slow. As for the moderation movement, a range of factors are contributing. It was a disappointing first half of the year for U.S. wine sales as a shaky economic backdrop quashed the signs of...