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Supply Chain Woes Are Rippling Though the Wine World

Stephen Bergquist is the supply chain manager for Mitchell Wine Group in Portland, Oregon, and has been living and breathing “unprecedented” logistical challenges for two years now. He’s seen the cost of shipping a single case of wine from Italy go from a pre-pandemic average of $13.50 a case to close to $20 a case by the end of 2021. Delays, port closures, backlogged containers, and random, unexpected shutdowns due to worker absences along major shipping lanes have conspired to make ordering and planning nearly impossible. “I’m seeing it all over the place: Winemakers can’t get corks, bottles, or labels, so that delays the bottling for international,” Bergquist says. “Domestically, it’s challenging too. When we used to be able to restock people in two to three weeks—now, it’s like six to eight weeks, and we get caught a little flat-footed. Grocery stores don’t like empty shelves.”

Last December, Bergquist was waiting on two containers of Champagne to meet the holiday demand. Typically, European wines come to Oregon via container ships that transit through the Panama Canal and into the Port of Seattle, the busiest port in the Pacific Northwest. Pre-pandemic, the whole process—from placing an order to the time of arrival at Mitchell’s Portland warehouse—took a little more than two months. Now, it can easily take up to five months for containers to make the same journey, and nothing is guaranteed. 

With the holidays looming and the Champagne in transit, Bergquist kept a close eye on its movement, but getting information was like pulling teeth. One container was anchored for over two weeks in the Puget Sound, unable to dock in Seattle, while the other’s journey ground to a halt prior to passing through the Panama Canal. Mitchell Wine Group was paying by the day to keep the wine refrigerated as it sat in the equatorial swelter, but Bergquist still couldn’t get information about when the wine was due to move. He wasn’t alone in his frustration: Global ocean carrier reliability officially dropped from 78 percent in 2019 to 35.8 percent in 2021. “Everything has its risk, but we just stay vigilant, look to plan, and adjust to the current situation,” he says. The full Champagne shipment arrived in Portland about 10 days before Christmas. Not ideal, but workable. 

Nearly everyone in the wine industry has been bending, curving, and pivoting at every turn to absorb cost increases in order to get wine into people’s hands. 

More than two years have passed since the pandemic first hit. As the peak of the crisis appears to recede, the world we’re reentering is recognizable, but altered. Reverberations will likely echo for some time—and that goes for the wine world, too. The global supply chain has experienced not just hiccups but full-on breakdowns almost continuously since early 2020. From winemakers to sommeliers, distributors, and importers, to materials suppliers and shop owners, most wine professionals have been struggling against disruptions in the supply chain steadily the whole time. Nearly everyone in the wine industry has been bending, curving, and pivoting at every turn to absorb cost increases in order to get wine into people’s hands. 

Until now, they’ve largely been successful in shielding consumers from sharp price increases and unprecedented access challenges. But in 2022, the battles that people in the industry have been fighting since the pandemic started are becoming apparent to everyday wine drinkers.

Any dusty corners of our collective knowledge of global supply chain logistics were given a thorough cleaning last summer, when the ill-fated container ship Ever Given got itself jammed in the Suez Canal, revealing how easily well-worn supply systems can grind to a halt. Though the case of the Ever Given was particularly dramatic, anyone in the wine industry can tell you that unprecedented problems, glitches, and shutdowns within the shipping industry have lately become not the exception but the rule. 

Shipping delays are impacting domestic winemakers, as their glass and cork suppliers struggle against the same delays while waiting for raw materials, and for their goods to slowly creep through overseas and overland routes. Gus Beltran, vice president of sales at M. A. Silva, a California-based manufacturer of natural corks and distributor of cork, glass, and packaging for the wine industry, has been hustling just as hard as Bergquist against the same global volatility. “To move a single container on the Trans-Pacific shipping lane, I’ve seen prices as high as $30,000 where they used to be about $2,500,” Beltran says.

The combination of increased demand and limited labor has created a perfect storm, and some carriers are using the storm to turn a greater profit.

The combination of increased demand and limited labor has created a perfect storm, and some carriers are using the storm to turn a greater profit. “Some carriers are doing something called ‘blank sailing.’ If they don’t get enough business—if the demand doesn’t quite fill a ship—they move product to the next shipment, which creates yet more delays and in some cases increases cost. Blank sailing is a very capitalistic move, and it’s extremely hard to manage or plan for on our end.”

Jordan Dunn-Small, whose family has owned and operated Woodward Canyon Winery in Walla Walla, Washington, since 1981, is now overseeing day-to-day operations there. Unlike many larger domestic winemakers, Dunn-Small’s family has always primarily sourced their glass domestically—but that hasn’t left them without headaches. With shipping in such a state of disarray, and sourcing from China presenting such a challenge, many larger wineries are scrambling to source domestically, so smaller wineries are often getting bumped. “I’m trying to be optimistic, but we’re in a waiting game,” she says, adding that the winery plans to order bottling supplies earlier than normal for next year. “There will be things that we won’t be able to release on schedule, there will be limbo and triage all year long. Everything around packaging just seems more unpredictable right now.”

Marlen Porter, co-winemaker along with her husband, Cameron, of Amplify Wines on California’s Central Coast, shares Dunn-Small’s read—that access to materials, particularly glass, is a huge headache. “Where we used to pay $4 a case for flint glass, we’re now paying $18 a case, and that’s if you can even get it at all,” Porter says. “With our wine ‘Mixtape 2020’ we waited two months for a glass shipment that never came. We ultimately had to go with a different bottle, and that bottle didn’t work with our labels very well.

These kinds of delays and the pivots they require mean that many wineries are sitting on wine that should have been bottled, if the winery had the glass to bottle it. If the winery isn’t large enough to have their own bottling line, issues arise with that, as well. Mobile bottling services often book out in advance, and it can be hard to plan around last-minute changes. 

Porter’s perspective is uniquely kaleidoscopic because she also works as the manager of shipping and winery relations for Natural Action, a nonprofit wine club whose proceeds go toward education, exposure, internships/apprenticeships, and career paths for BIPOC students in the wine industry. Dealing with shipping her own Amplify Wines as well as Natural Action’s wine club wines, along with price and availability changes coming from Natural Action’s partner wineries, she’s been deeply immersed in the industry’s challenges for two solid years. From lack of people-power and materials to overseas shipping and overland trucking, she’s seen the issue from all sides. But Porter’s matter-of-fact about what wine lovers should prepare for in the coming months. What can we, as wine drinkers, expect in 2022 and beyond? “Price increases of 15 to 20 percent, as of right now,” she says. “That’s definitely going to be the hardest thing for consumers.” 

“Please support makers you love—if you used to be able to buy bottles and now you can only buy two, that’s okay! Just please don’t decide to buy none, or a lot of us won’t make it through this.”—Marlen Porter

Porter has already seen the effect of these increases in her own tasting room in Santa Maria. Where people used to buy wines by the case, it’s more common these days to sell just a bottle or two at a time. It’s been hard, but she remains hopeful that wine lovers will continue to support the wines they love as they are able. “We love making wine and we want to keep making your favorite bottles. But, to be transparent, we need to charge more now to keep doing it. Please support makers you love—if you used to be able to buy bottles and now you can only buy two, that’s okay! Just please don’t decide to buy none, or a lot of us won’t make it through this.”

For Cristie Norman, lead sommelier at Delilah at the Wynn Las Vegas, supply chain issues have meant that every day is a guessing game in terms of what wines she’ll have to offer guests. “There’ve been many days where I actually received less than half of what I ordered, or nothing at all,” she says. “I’m constantly needing to find more wines to sell, only to have them sell out right away. It’s a revolving door of out-of-stocks.” 

Between natural disasters—like West Coast wildfires—that had already diminished supply, and now the fallout from the ongoing pandemic, Norman agrees that costs will go up significantly over the next few years, especially for very special or very popular wines. “Wine is an agricultural product made in limited quantities,” she says. “When the demand is so high, sometimes it’s just not possible to get more of a specific wine from a specific year.

”It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Many people—sommeliers in particular—see possibility simmering beneath the surface of this moment, and Norman is one of them. She’s working harder than ever to comb the wine landscape, which has meant making new discoveries and, in turn, introducing consumers to those new, exciting bottles. “I think that’s a huge positive,” she says. “For example, big-brand Champagne supply has been a huge problem. When guests ask for their go-to expensive brand, it’s a fun opportunity to sell other Champagnes they may have never heard of before, but are equally delicious.” 

Beverage director Luis Rivera of Marta in New York City has chosen to see this moment as a challenge to rise to. Although he admits that, at first, the supply chain hiccups were “really obnoxious,” he and many others in the industry quickly realized that they had to do what they’re best at—getting creative, and tapping into a little hustle. “Getting really mad isn’t going to do anything about the situation,” he says. “So maybe we can turn it around and make something interesting happen. Maybe we showcase a new winemaker, or a smaller producer. We give them a little limelight, and we’re showing our guests, ‘Hey, look! It turns out that people you’ve never heard of are making really cool stuff.’” 

Even people whose daily job it is to navigate through shipping debacles see a light at the end of the tunnel. Bergquist looks at the long game, and he can see a world in which all the pivots that they’ve had to make are ultimately a good thing. “It’s forced us to find solutions we’d never looked at, and we’ve learned now to always price out more than one option,” he says. “When things get better down the line, it’ll mean we’re much more efficient. It’s taught us ways to do our jobs better, and that will ultimately benefit the consumer.” 

It’s going to cost more to drink good wine, but that’s no reason to stop loving wine or being curious. If anything, there’s never been a better time to be an adventurous wine drinker with a palate for discovery.

It’s going to cost more to drink good wine, but that’s no reason to stop loving wine or being curious. If anything, there’s never been a better time to be an adventurous wine drinker with a palate for discovery. You may not be able to find a particular bottle from a specific year—rigidity will need to go the way of inexpensive bottles of Veuve. But the same guiding principles for buying and drinking great wines that have always constituted a wine lover’s best practices will hold true. 

Marie Cheslik, a Chicago-based sommelier and co-founder of Slik Wines, has a particularly upbeat view of the moment. “I think it’s actually sort of a buyer’s market,” she says. “You’re going to have to try new things, but restaurants are going to want to give you a good value, knowing that you’re going to have to step outside of your comfort zone. We’re going to do the best that we can to give you a good deal. I still want to get good wine at a good value into people’s hands.” 

Due to the supply chain crisis, wine prices are inevitably going up. But perhaps that’s the price of discovery, and perhaps it’s a small one to pay when you consider that it means, potentially, unearthing new wines, or varietals or vintners to follow and enjoy for years to come. Or, more bluntly, as Luis Rivera puts it, “It’s a really awesome time to be learning about wine—because, honestly, we have no other choice.”

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