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The renowned Beckstoffer Vineyards is dramatically scaling back its wine grape operations in Lake and Mendocino counties, with plans to pull out more than half of its vines.
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At its peak, Beckstoffer was farming around 4,000 acres of wine grapes in the two counties and Napa. Now, the vineyard plans to farm 140 acres in Lake County, 800 in Mendocino County and maintain its 1,000 acres in Napa.
The reduction in acreage led to dozens of employee layoffs.
“I’ve been doing this for 28 years, … and people are saying this is just never seen before — how drastic and fast things turned (for the wine industry),” said Brandon Axell, Beckstoffer’s executive vice president of farming. “…It’s incredibly hard for me.”
Large enterprises such as the 50-year-old Beckstoffer are not immune from the wine industry’s plight. California growers and winemakers of all sizes are wrestling with an oversaturated market due to a steep drop-off in consumer demand. In recent years, many grape growers have left fruit to rot on vines and many winemakers have product sitting in tanks. Numerous grape growers and winemakers have laid off staff.
The 2025 Standing Winegrape Acreage report, commissioned by the California Association of Winegrape Growers and released in November, shows more than 38,000 acres of vineyards were removed between Oct. 1, 2024, and Aug. 1, 2025.
Lake and Mendocino counties, where Beckstoffer is pulling its vines, aren’t even in the top 10 of counties which removed the most acres of vines, according to the report. Those counties were San Joaquin, Fresno, Monterey, Napa, Sonoma, San Luis Obispo, Madera, Sacramento, Santa Barbara and Yolo.
For Beckstoffer, the company was spending more than what it was earning. As a result, the team eventually had to make what Axell called a “real world decision.”
The company — which, unlike many wine grape growers, has some of its winemaker partners include its name on bottle labels — is pulling vines with uncontracted grapes. Beckstoffer will produce thousands fewer tons of fruit. The company also saw declines in its bulk wine sales.
The vineyard farms grapes for an average of 80 small and large winemakers per year. Over the years, Axell said those wineries have shrunk their grape orders. He declined to comment on specific brands.
Starting last year, Beckstoffer pulled out 800 acres of grapevines from Lake County’s volcanic soil and plans to continue its downsizing slowly throughout the rest of this year. The company originally decided to continue farming hundreds of acres in the county at the start of the season but made the shift to cease farming on those acres mid-season this year, Axell said.
The company has grown grapes in Lake County for 30 years, with Axell calling the region “one of the great unsung producers of high quality Cabernet.”
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The remaining acreage in Lake County will primarily consist of cabernet sauvignon. The company feels the remaining property produces the best quality fruit, Axell said.
In Mendocino County, around 400 acres of vines have been uprooted. Beckstoffer plans on replanting that acreage in the future, Axell said, so the farming infrastructure still stands.
The Napa and Mendocino operations are “still going strong but certainly feeling the downturn in the economy as well,” Axell said.
The grape crush from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service shows wineries crushed 2.62 million tons of wine grapes in the Golden State in 2025, down over 8% from 2024. The average prices for red and white wine grapes per ton were down 4.4% and 0.9%, respectively, from 2024 to 2025.
The company said it laid off 50 of its 65 employees. Right now, the business is steady, Axell said, but that doesn’t mean more cuts won’t occur down the line.
“The toughest part of it has been the human part of it,” said Axell, who has been with the company for 17 years. There were and are many other long-time Beckstoffer employees, he said.
The company did not make Andy Beckstoffer, chairman and CEO of Beckstoffer Vineyards, available for comment. Beckstoffer, dubbed the “most powerful grower in Napa” by The Wall Street Journal in 2011, lives in Napa, according to the company’s website.
Axell said he hopes the wine industry will “right the ship” in two years.
“We’re very fortunate to work for a great family operation who is in it for the long term,” Axell said. “We know they will put the resources in needed to survive and continue. It just may not be at the level we were once accustomed to.”
This story was originally published July 29, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline “Acclaimed California vineyard joins industry trend of tearing out acres of vines.”
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