I am not, and you should not be, too concerned about the "poor" folks that are selling their equipment and facilities, dumping cases of wine "below" cost, or plowing under their vines, because these are primarily large corporations that over-expanded too rapidly during the boom times. Or they are amateur "vintners" that thought they could retire from professional careers and start a vineyard and winery as a "plaything" and make $100,000+ annually in profit as "gentlemen farmers" after hiring all the work done by others.
If you have tried many of these wines (I don't think anyone could be familiar with all of them, because they have come and gone so quickly), they are typically thin, unremarkable wines that are significantly "doctored" and adjusted in the lab, but with a substantial amount of effort put into labeling and marketing. These are the kind of products that gives "California wines" a bad name, because they are essentially mass-produced swill, dressed up and talked about like they are something special. What they really are, generally, is "Two-buck Chuck" (Charles Shaw) but with a $10 to $20 to $40 price tag.
This is a generalization, of course, and maybe I'm being too critical, but the snobbery of California's wineries as being superior to the rest of the U.S. has always struck me as laughably hypocritical since that is precisely how most of the Old World wineries consider California wineries - a few diamonds in the rough, but still, mostly, the rough. I'm glad our free market economy is clearing out the underperformers and over-priced garbage, because it will free up shelf space for higher quality and properly priced wines from all over the U.S. and the world.
It's a good thing that Washington is not planning a bail-out of these wineries/vineyards - we're better off without them. I don't believe there is a winemaker out there who can take sub-par grapes/juice from sub-standard land (passed over in prior times as unaccetpable), and make a quality wine out of it - low-priced cooking wine, yes, but not $15-$20/bottle merlot or zin. Better to let those grapes go unsold than to be made into something nobody wants to buy unless its marked down to the price of the bottle, label and cork.
Bart
P.S. did I mention that my degree is in economics? It's mainly the business end of "luxury" goods like fine wine that has fascinated me since I was in high school, and receessions, though painful, also offer some excellent lessons in exposing the greed and hypoocrisy of the "elites" of every industry.
Bart
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