Wine industry faces decreasing demand across Oregon

PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) – It is peak harvest season for vineyards in the Willamette Valley but the wine industry is facing many challenges this year, including wine sales being down across the board. Now, some wineries are making adjustments.

According to the Oregon Wine Board, vineyards planted more than 2,000 more acres of grapes than they did in the previous year. But they also pointed out wine sales have consistently gone down since 2019. Now wineries have had to get creative on how they make money.

“It’s hard,” Kim Kolb the director of operations at Oak Knoll Winery said, “it’s really hard to try and get people to come out, I mean there were only two people who have been in here today.”

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While some days have been slower than others at the Oak Knoll Winery in Hillsboro, Kolb says they have started taking different approaches in attracting folks to their tasting room.

“We do a lot of things here at the winery, we do events, we are doing anything we can to bring people in the door and do wine sales,” Kolb said.

Oak Knoll is one of Oregon’s oldest wineries, opening back in 1970. Kolb said over the years the way people enjoy wine has changed and they are trying to keep up.

“When we do events we sell out, when we do concerts we sell out, we do bingo and wine, we sell out, so people are coming to the events. It’s more the wine tastings they are not doing anymore. They are just looking for something fun to do,” Kolb said.

Even by adding concerts and bingo nights to bring in more customers, they have had to make some major cuts in production.

“This year we cut our pinot gris, we’ve cut our Niagara production, we are looking to  continue to cut that we have cut production way back,” Kolb explained, “That Niagara production is going to have to go down because we are not selling 34,000 cases a year now we are down to like 10,000.”

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Kolb says their whole sale is what has gone down the most and that could be due to the market being over-saturated.

“It’s hard to get the wine in the market because there are so many wineries out there, so everyone is feeling it. So wine sales are not as good anymore so we try to get people out here and even that is a little bit down as well so we would like to see more.” Kolb said.

Just 20 years ago there were only 215 wineries in the state, now there are more than 1,200. So now with lower sales and tasting rooms not being as busy, Kolb has also had to cut back on staff.

“During summer we usually have 2 or 3 people working the tasting room. But, we have been doing one person and a half shift this summer.” Kolb said. “I think all tasting rooms are feeling it, they are just not busy like they used to be which is hurting.”

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