The perils of Pot (to the wine Industry)

This week´s presentation on Green Thumb Industries by Wendy Berger left me thinking about cannabis not only as a regulatory proxy for the Wine Industry in the US but also on the topic of the "share of buzz" battle the spirits, beer, wine and cannabis Industries are fighting.

I ran into this short article on the Economist (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/10/11/cannabis-v-wine-in-california)  that very succinctly states the major areas where wine and cannabis are most likely to come head to head in the upcoming decade. Two points really surprised me.

The first was the battle for harvest labor. Come harvest time, wine growers are having an increasingly harder time finding adequate labor (both in volume and in talent) to help pick the grapes. While the wine Industry's harvest time is seasonal, cannabis is grown and harvested year round, so they can provide better job security and stability for their employees. Additionally, marijuana pay is much better and work is much easier. Some growers even allow workers to do work from home a lot of the time. If you google "harvest labor lost to cannabis"  a myriad of articles and OpEds on this subject will appear on your screen.  Great wine is highly dependent on manual labor these days, so if this trend within the labor force is to remain, I wonder what the price implications for us wine drinkers will be in the future, or if industrialization will be the solution to this mounting problem.

The second issue that surprised me was the Wine Industry´s fear of loss of "buzz share" of women and baby boomers predominantly. I don't know about you, but when I picture the quintessential cannabis user it is not a 50+-year-old woman. But now that marijuana is legalized, that might change. Legalization, as well as cannabis' newfound appeal to the "health-conscious inebriate",  might serve as new pathways to lead older women into this field - and wine growers don´t know how to battle this.

Whatever anyone's thoughts on cannabis and marijuana, it looks that this is an industry that is not only here to stay, but that will continue growing in the US, and with it its (registered) user base. it will be interesting to see what the real-life implications to the Wine Industry are, and how the Industry chooses to respond to them.