A weaker grape price, capped yields and higher operating costs have squeezed grower profitability, and concerns are mounting for further pressure next season
Tina Morrison, Newsroom | 30/07/2025
Grape growers produced a bumper crop this season, but an unprecedented amount of fruit never made it to a winery, and was left to wither on the vine or rot on the ground as winemakers grappled with oversupply after declining global demand.
Ideal growing conditions bolstered the 2025 harvest to 519,000 tonnes, the second largest on record (the largest harvest, 532,000 tonnes, was in 2022).
But an extra 75,000 to 100,000 tonnes of fruit have remained unharvested this season after wineries capped grape volumes, according to Mike Insley, a 30-year industry veteran based in the country’s biggest wine region, Marlborough.
“I can’t remember a year like it for unharvested fruit,” said Insley, a viticulture consultant at Grape Sense who was chief operating officer at Yealands Wine Group and national viticulture manager at Pernod Ricard NZ.
“Companies picked what they were required to pick, and left the rest behind.”
The bumper vintage comes as domestic storage is close to capacity after falling global demand, the Ministry for Primary Industries noted in its latest Situation and Outlook report in June.
Wineries’ inventories of sauvignon blanc, the country’s flagship wine, were at 10-year highs before this year’s harvest, the ministry noted in December.
In Marlborough, which produced 81.5 percent of the national harvest this season, most of it sauvignon blanc, Insley estimates 15-20 percent of the tonnage was unharvested.
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