Where Does Quality Wine Come From In The US?

Defining quality wine.

There’s a difference between producing wine and producing good wine. We wanted to get a sense of where good wine is coming from, so we scraped a well-known wine award source: the SF Chronicle. The SF Chronicle hosts an annual North America wine competition where thousands of wineries submit their wines for review from all over the United States (and even some from Mexico and Canada). However, since these wines are submitted by winemakers, there is a risk of selection bias.

Explaining States, Regions, Sub Regions, and AVAs.

What’s most important to know here, is that wines are typically labelled by the most specific geographic label they can legally claim, because that tends to sell better. Legally, a wine must have 85% of the grapes come from that region to claim it. So if you were to see “Napa” instead of “Napa Valley”, you should interpret that as being from a broader geographic region within the Sub Region of Napa.

Where does quality wine come from?

While California takes most of the cake, with 72% of award-winning wines in the SF Chronicle competition coming from California, the next states are Oregon: 12%, Washington: 6%, Texas: 3%, and New York: 2%. This was particularly surprising, as many people do not think past the West Coast when they think about wine. In fact, 20 out of the 50 states produced award-winning wine in 2019.

How has this changed over time? Are any wine states growing faster than others?

Again, although California contributes to most of the award-winning wine in the United States, we see other states like Oregon with an increasing share over the past 5 years. This suggests a general trend of increasing diversity of states producing quality wine in the US. The fastest growing region was Texas, seeing a 2x increase from 2014 to 2019. In that same time period, New York decreased 50%, and California decreased 6%.

Is California wine more than just Napa wine?

Breaking out California award-winning wines by sub-region, we see that Napa only contributes to 15–20% of award-winning wines. The leading 7 subregions are (in order): Sonoma, Napa, Paso Robles, Lodi, Sierra Foothills, San Francisco Bay, and Mendocino. We see the relative contribution of those subregions to overall California award-winning wines to be somewhat unchanged over the years, with no clear trends.

Want to try quality wine from different states? Look for these top AVAs.

So what conclusions do we draw from this?

Award-winning wines are becoming increasingly diverse in origin from across the United States, including some surprising states such as Texas. When we think of top wines, we are quick to think of California, and specifically Napa. However, this analysis demonstrates that there is more to the US wine scene than that.

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