Back to the '90s: What a Generational Reset in Wine Could Mean for the Towns Built Around It
The 2025 California Grape Crush Report landed last week, and the chart provided really hit me.
2.62 million tons. That's the total California crush for 2025 -- 8% below 2024, 23% below the five-year average, and the lightest crop on record since 1999. Lodi Chardonnay came in at 86,000 tons, the smallest since 1998. Zinfandel crushed only 51,400 tons in District 11, a number that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago when the region historically cleared 100,000 tons without blinking.
The numbers aren't just declining. They're resetting to the late 1990s.
And that's what I can't stop thinking about.
A Question About Time
People have been drinking wine for somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 years. It is one of the oldest continuously produced goods in human civilization. Wine has outlasted empires, survived prohibitions, crossed oceans, adapted to every climate and culture it has touched.
In Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, he makes a deceptively simple argument: things that have survived a very long time are not merely resilient -- they actually gain from stress, volatility, and disruption. He calls this property antifragility. It's different from toughness or durability. A rock is robust. It withstands stress. But an antifragile system doesn't just withstand -- it gets stronger when shaken. Wine, by this logic, should be one of the most antifragile goods on earth. It has been shaken for millennia and kept coming back.
Taleb also describes what he calls the Lindy Effect: for non-perishable things (ideas, technologies, cultural practices), every additional period of survival implies a longer expected remaining lifespan. Something that has been around for a thousand years is not "old" -- it's proven. It should, in theory, be around for a thousand more.
So here's the question I keep sitting with:
If wine has been antifragile for thousands of years, why does the California wine industry feel so fragile right now?
What Made Wine Unkillable
I think the answer has something to do with why wine was antifragile in the first place.
For most of human history, wine wasn't one thing. It was many things to many people, all at the same time. It was a method of water purification in cities where clean drinking water was scarce. It was medicine -- prescribed, dosed, and administered with intention. It was sacrament, woven into the liturgical fabric of multiple religious traditions. It was social infrastructure -- the thing around which meals, negotiations, and relationships were organized. It was an economic engine that sustained entire regional economies. It was aesthetic experience, craftsmanship, and terroir-driven expression of place. And it was daily sustenance -- not a luxury, but a staple.
That redundancy of purpose is the key. Wine wasn't antifragile because it was good at one thing. It was antifragile because it was embedded in so many layers of human life simultaneously that no single disruption could unseat it. If one job disappeared -- say, water purification improved -- wine still had a dozen other reasons to exist.
This is exactly what Taleb describes as the architecture of antifragility: distributed exposure, no single point of failure, and the ability to benefit from the unexpected.
The Narrowing
There's a framework in innovation theory called Jobs to Be Done, originally articulated by Clayton Christensen. The idea is straightforward: people don't buy products -- they "hire" them to do a job in their life. The question isn't what is this product? but what job is the customer hiring this product to do?
When I look at the California wine industry through this lens, something becomes clear.
Somewhere in the explosive growth period that began in the late 1990s and accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s, the industry narrowed wine's job description. What had been a product hired for a dozen overlapping jobs gradually became optimized around a much smaller set of roles: an evening relaxation ritual, a sophistication signal, and an accompaniment to a particular lifestyle demographic.
I'm not suggesting this was intentional. It was probably the natural consequence of scaling. When you're producing at volume, you optimize for consistency. When you're marketing at scale, you target a profile. When you're distributing nationally, you smooth out the local idiosyncrasies -- the weirdness, the terroir-specificity, the relationship-driven sales -- that don't travel well in a three-tier system.
But the effect was the same. Wine went from being many things to many people to being one thing to one market.
The Unbundling
And that's exactly the kind of narrow job description that invites competition.
Think about what's happened over the last decade. Cannabis entered the legal market and immediately solved the relaxation-without-consequences job -- no calories, no hangover, increasingly destigmatized. Craft cocktails and spirits like mezcal captured the exploration and connoisseurship job that wine used to own. Non-alcoholic beverages -- from Athletic Brewing to Ghia to Curious Elixirs -- took the social-ritual-without-alcohol job. Functional beverages claimed the wellness-adjacent space. Even sparkling water brands carved out territory in the "something interesting in my glass at dinner" job.
No single competitor killed wine. The job got unbundled. Each alternative now solves a specific slice of what wine used to do -- often with more precision, more convenience, or fewer trade-offs for the consumer.
This is the classic disruption pattern Christensen described, but applied through a Talebian lens: the industry didn't become fragile because the world changed. It became fragile because it had already optimized away the redundancy that made it durable.
The Distinction That Matters
Here's where I think the nuance lives, and why I keep coming back to it.
Wine the substance is still Lindy. People will drink wine in 500 years. The cultural, biological, and aesthetic relationship between humans and fermented grapes is ancient and deeply embedded. That's not going away.
But wine the industry -- specifically the scaled, volume-dependent, monoculture-driven California model -- may have traded its antifragility for efficiency. It concentrated production in fewer, larger operations. It reduced varietal diversity in favor of what the market demanded at volume. It centralized distribution. It became dependent on a narrow consumer demographic. And it shed the very characteristics -- locality, experimentation, embeddedness in community, diversity of purpose -- that had made wine unkillable for millennia.
Taleb has a term for this: fragilizing. Taking something that gains from disorder and restructuring it so that it breaks under stress. The 2025 crush numbers might be evidence that the fragilizing has reached a tipping point.
What Could This Mean for a Place Like Lodi?
This is where my thinking shifts from wine to place -- because I live in Lodi, and I don't think you can separate the two here.
Lodi's identity has been intertwined with grape growing for generations. The land, the families, the infrastructure, the rhythms of the town -- all of it shaped by agriculture in general and wine grapes in particular. When crush volumes decline at this scale, it's not just an industry headline. It ripples through families, through land-use decisions, through the economic base of the community, through how a city understands itself.
But I wonder if this moment might also be an opening.
If the lesson of antifragility is that wine became fragile when it narrowed its purpose and disconnected from place, then could a community like Lodi move in the opposite direction? What would it look like for a wine region to re-embed its agricultural identity into the broader life of the town -- not as a commodity shipped elsewhere, but as one thread in a richer fabric of local identity?
I keep thinking about placemaking in this context. Not placemaking as a branding exercise or a mural project, but as the slow, deliberate work of making a place more layered in the reasons people want to be there. What if Lodi's downtown, its public spaces, its gathering places were designed around the same kind of redundancy of purpose that made wine antifragile for millennia? Spaces that aren't optimized for one use or one demographic, but that serve multiple overlapping jobs -- community, commerce, culture, daily life -- simultaneously.
I find myself asking questions I don't have answers to yet. Could a tasting room also function as a neighborhood gathering space -- a place people go not just for wine, but for the kind of social infrastructure that wine used to provide naturally? Could the relationship between vineyard and town become more visible, more participatory, less separated by a distribution chain? Could a downtown become a genuine living room for the community in a way that makes wine one ingredient in a much larger experience of place?
And what about the land itself? When acreage comes out of production -- as 57,000 acres reportedly did in 2025 -- that's a land-use question as much as an agricultural one. What replaces those vines? Is there an opportunity to think about that land not just in terms of the next crop, but in terms of what it could contribute to the community's long-term identity and resilience?
I notice that the places which seem to have navigated agricultural transitions well -- towns that have woven their farming identity into a genuine sense of place rather than a single-industry brand -- tend to be more durable. They have more reasons to exist. They attract a more diverse base of people who are there for overlapping reasons. They're harder to unseat because they're not dependent on one story.
Healdsburg comes to mind. Paso Robles is heading in this direction. But both of those have had significant investment and intentional placemaking behind the scenes -- not just market forces, but people asking deliberate questions about what their town could become.
What if a contraction like this -- painful as it is for the families and businesses in the middle of it -- creates the conditions for Lodi to ask a different kind of question? Not "how do we get back to peak crush volumes?" but "how do we build a place that has so many reasons to thrive that no single industry downturn can break it?"
That would be the antifragile move. Not for the wine industry alone, but for the community built around it.
And it might look a lot more like the '90s than the 2010s -- smaller, more relational, more curious about what this place could become rather than certain about what it already is.
Back to the '90s
Which brings me to the question I started with. If the crush volumes are resetting to the late 1990s -- pre-boom, pre-scale, pre-optimization -- I find myself wondering whether there's an invitation in that.
Not to go backward literally. The world is different now, and nostalgia isn't a strategy. But maybe back to the posture.
What was the mindset of someone growing grapes in the mid-to-late 1990s? Was there a scrappiness? An experimental energy? A sense that wine's identity -- and maybe the town's identity alongside it -- was still being figured out rather than settled? Were growers more connected to their communities, their local markets, their neighbors? Was wine still embedded in enough different jobs -- enough different reasons to exist -- that it felt durable in a way that raw volume can't provide?
And was there a sense of place in the '90s that got diluted in the scaling years? A feeling that the wine and the town and the land and the people were all part of the same project?
I don't know the answers. I wasn't in the industry in the '90s.
But I suspect that the path forward -- for both the wine industry and for the communities built around it -- looks less like restoring production to its peak and more like rediscovering the diversity of purpose that made wine, and the places that grew it, matter in the first place. More varietals, more local identity, more reasons to exist beyond a single consumer ritual. More embeddedness in place. More overlap between the life of the vine and the life of the town.
Maybe the posture of the '90s is the thing worth recovering. Not the numbers, but the orientation. Smaller. More curious. More rooted.
I'd love to hear from anyone who was growing grapes in the late 1990s -- or building a life in a wine community during that era. What did it feel like? And does any of this resonate with where things are headed now?
Data referenced from the Turrentine Brokerage 2025 Preliminary California Grape Crush Report, released March 13, 2026.