Why Half Full. Why Now?

Notes from a founder, written in the middle of the worst wine market in decades, by someone who thinks that’s good news.

The Room We’re Walking Into

The world does not need another wine brand.

Worth saying out loud before anything else, because pretending otherwise is how most of this industry got into the mess it’s in. U.S. wine sales dropped roughly six percent in 2024, the steepest annual decline in decades, and 2025 fell again. Pacific Rim, a Riesling house most of the trade respected, filed Chapter 11 this spring. Vintage Wine Estates, one of the biggest producers in the country, filed in 2024 with roughly four hundred million dollars in liabilities. California growers have pulled more than 85,000 acres of vines in the last two years, about one acre in six, and in Lodi, families are tearing out vines they’ve farmed for generations because the math no longer works.

That’s the room we’re walking into. Eyes open.

So no, the world does not need more wine. More volume. More case stacks at Costco. More Caymus clones. More tasting rooms charging forty-five dollars for a flight of something forgettable while a sommelier explains terroir to people who came for a nice afternoon and didn’t ask for the speech.

What the world could use, what we think matters right now, is more earned, passionate, real optimism. Wine has always been one of the best carriers of that.