New York State’s Wine-and-Grape Business Grows
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The fruit of the vine is lifting economic spirits across New York State.
The global wine-and-grape industry sent $6 billion flowing through the state economy last year, and homegrown vineyards were the biggest contributors, a California research firm said in a report yesterday.
With 31,000 acres of vineyards, 212 wineries, and 1,384 grape farms, New York is the nation’s second-largest wine producer after California and the third biggest grape grower behind California and Washington.
Wineries, grape producers, and related businesses in New York, from liquor stores to makers of bottles, glasses, and labels, account for almost 36,000 jobs and a $1.3 billion payroll, Napa Valley based MKF Research said.
Wine sales alone generate $420 million in sales, but the state industry’s multiplier impact on the economy came to $3.4 billion in 2004, the state-sponsored study found. That was topped off with $2.6 billion in direct and indirect economic benefits from the wine-and-grape industry in other states and countries.
“When you trace it from the vineyard to the table, wine is the ultimate value-added product, “the president of the New York Wine & Grape Foundation, Jim Trezise, said. “It’s a gold mine for agriculture and tourism and manufacturing and many other sectors of the economy.”
The industry’s economic impact is probably greater than $6 billion because New York had an unusually small grape harvest last year and data on property taxes and various “allied industries” were difficult to gather, the managing director of MKF Research in St. Helena, Calif., Barbara Insel, said.
A long-awaited state law allowing the direct shipment of wines into and out of New York went into effect in August and looks likely to give the industry a dynamic boost, she said.
About 70% of New York’s wineries have opened in the last 20 years – 63 of them since 2000. Nearly half of all wineries are rooted in the Finger Lakes region in west-central New York, where a grape friendly micro-climate is created by deep, slender, hill-framed lakes.
From Long Island and the Hudson Valley across to Lake Erie, New York’s wineries are drawing nearly three times as many visitors as a decade ago, the New York Agricultural Statistics Service said in a recent survey.
