The 2026 vintage did not seem easy for many DGW clients, and I wonder if that is the case for you, as well. In some regions, harvest demanded a lot of careful deliberation. In others, it called for quick, decisive calls to keep pace with a compressed, intense picking window. Compared to 2025, 2026 was […]
Wine Consulting
Controlling the Shifting Wine Landscape, Part 1: Wine Quality
The tasting room is ready before the first guest ever walks through the door. Shelves are lined with fresh bottles, each one positioned just so. No dust. No fingerprints on the bottles. Behind the bar, glasses stand in perfect rows, polished, disappearing in the tasting room light. Tables wiped down, chairs pulled out at just […]
Harvest Season Looks Different This Year: Here’s How to Prepare
I don’t think there is any way to get around the fact that there’s a lot working against wineries heading into harvest 2026. Oversupply in the broader market, rising production costs, unpredictable weather patterns, and labor shortages have made pre-harvest planning more critical, and more complicated, than it has been in years. The wineries that […]
After the Freeze: How Wineries Can Manage Extreme Crop Loss
Throughout April, most of the Eastern seaboard and parts of the Midwest experienced a series of frost and freeze events that will likely have an impact on the 2026 wine grape supply. The most extreme of these events was through the April 21st morning in which several states experienced record low temperatures for several hours (Vigna […]
The Low-Alcohol Wine Boom: Don’t Get Left Behind
Low- and no-alcohol wines are certainly having a moment, which Virginia and I previously discussed in the Voices of the Vine podcast episode, “The Quest for Producing Good Low Alcohol Wine” (S.1, Ep.1). Luckily, most producers across the U.S. can take advantage of low-alcohol wine production. This includes you! While non-alcohol wines require sophisticated technology […]
Winemaking Success Stories from Vintage 2025
While everyone else is talking about what’s broken in the wine industry, I’m going to show you what’s working. The 2025 vintage brought immediate breakthroughs for DGW Clients who made small strategic shifts. With some winemakers we solved problems they’d been fighting for years, and for others we saved entire crops by making quick-thinking decisions. […]
