El Dorado Probably has Labor Issues, Too
Well, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is at least a little bit less true than you originally thought. After asking for feedback in my last blog post, I got some. I was wondering why government data showed that, corrected for inflation, labor rates in El Dorado looked to be steady - or maybe even falling - while total grape sales rose. I also pondered the meaning of fewer reported businesses employing vineyard workers. The mystery is not completely solved, bu
Is El Dorado the Secret Land of Non-Existent Vineyard Labor Issues?
On March 20th, I’ll be speaking to the El Dorado Wine Grape Growers’ Association. They’re a great group – they always have a lot of great questions and they're great at sharing their knowledge with each other and me. They also put me up in the Cary House, a nice, old-timey hotel in downtown Placerville, which might be the most underrated town in California. And it's a real place, unlike El Dorado's mythical namesake. Map to a very different El Dorado: My presentation is go
Are We Hiring into a Industry-Wide Downturn?
This month’s issue of Wine Business Monthly has a lot of useful information in it. A lot of talk of headwinds up ahead for the wine industry, along with some justifiable “yes, but stay calm”-type of advice. For regular readers of this blog, you know that I've been worried for a long time that 2019 would signal a cyclical downturn for grape growers and that, more recently, I've come to believe we're headed into a recession and an industry-wide slump. Which is why I was also
The Three Horsemen of the Grapepocalypse, Part 3: The Rising and Sticky Cost of Labor
I hoped that Part 3 of the Three Horsemen of the Grapepocalypse would be shorter than the wannabe magnum opus I stumbled into last week. Bu
Six Ways to Prevent Deportation of Your Employees
As many of you know, vineyard owners and managers are suffering from a severe shortage of labor. The need to rebuild after the wildfires is going to seriously exacerbate this. On top of this, the current administration has been more vigorous than past administrations in its enforcement of immigration laws and seems poised to focus on California in the future, with Thomas Homan, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stating that California is “about to
Interested in Protecting your Workforce from Deportation?
Today, the North Bay Rapid Response Network is launching to try to reduce the threat of deportation to local, undocumented residents. Their activities are centered on Sonoma Napa Counties and include education, providing legal observers to document ICE actions and providing support to families who have had someone deported. They would like to contact vineyard owners, managers and workers to provide education on how to avoid and cope with ICE actions against vineyard crews.
