Doug’s Dime: A Hard Time For Wine?

California’s wineries are struggling with a glut of wine and awful margins, as the region produces too much product and the world drinks too little of it. Some vintners are switching things up and ripping out vines to plant alternative crops, among them agave, the succulent that constitutes the key ingredient in tequila and mezcal. Agave is cheaper and also consumes less water — it costs $10,000 an acre to plant agave versus $70,000 an acre to plant grapes, and it survives on natural rainfall — but there are still risks. Key among those risks is the uncertainty about what spirit the agave will eventually turn into, as there’s very little distilling capacity in California. And due to denomination of origin, any alcoholic beverage derived from the California agave can’t legally be sold as tequila or mezcal anyway. Redd Brown, Bloomberg