Short answer: the question is whether the $10 store-brand Cabernet is the same wine as the $60 bottle three aisles over, and this year the answer is yes more often than at any time in thirty years. But a store label is built to hide where the wine came from, so you have to read the four lines of fine print that the law will not let them hide: the appellation, the bottler, the vintage and the alcohol.
What happened
I wrote a few weeks ago that the glut was real. It has now arrived in the grocery aisle. California makes about four bottles in five of all American wine, and for three years it has made more than anyone is drinking. Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 report says bulk wine, the unbottled stuff sitting in tanks waiting for a buyer, is at record levels, and the state’s crush has fallen to 2.2 million tons from a high of 4.28 million. Wineries with full tanks have four choices: sell it off under their own name at a loss, blend it into next year, pour it down the drain, or sell it in bulk to someone who will put a different label on it.
That last door is the one that matters to you. Steve Beckner, who has bought private-label wine for Grocery Outlet for nearly thirty years, says that in 2018 a bulk offer was one to three thousand cases. Now it is twenty to two hundred thousand. He has a Napa Cabernet that would carry a $45 to $85 label at the winery sitting in his stores at $9.99 under a house label called, with a straight face, Second Cheapest Wine. Kroger went from zero wines scored 90 or better to twenty in two months. Costco cut its Kirkland Signature Stags Leap Cabernet from $22.99 to $19.99. A private-label company called Navigator has a Napa Cabernet that retailed at $149 and will sell it under its own name for $29.99.
Peter Baedeker, a Santa Barbara retailer, calls it the best moment for wine buyers in his career. Taylor Case at Navigator says the market will find its balance in twelve to twenty-four months. Both are right, and the second one is the deadline.
How to read the label they hope you won’t
A store label tells you nothing on the front. It is designed that way. The back label, and the small print at the bottom of the front, is where the law makes them talk. Four lines.
The appellation. This is the single biggest tell. If the bottle says “Napa Valley,” at least 85 percent of the grapes came from Napa, by federal rule, and nobody wastes Napa grapes on bad wine. “Sonoma County” or “Paso Robles” is nearly as good. “North Coast” is a wide net but an honest one. “California” on its own means the grapes could have come from anywhere in the state, which usually means the hot Central Valley, which usually means a wine built for volume. A $10 bottle that says Napa Valley is the glut talking. A $10 bottle that says California is just a $10 bottle.
The bottler line. Somewhere in small type it will say who made it. “Produced and bottled by” means the named company fermented at least three quarters of what is in the bottle, which is as close to a winery’s signature as a store brand gets. “Vinted and bottled by,” or “bottled by” with nothing in front of it, means the juice was bought finished and put in glass. Neither one is a crime, but the first is a winery clearing its own stock and the second is a tank that changed hands. And read the town after the name. St. Helena, Rutherford, Oakville, Healdsburg: those are real wine towns with real facilities. Modesto and Lodi are where the volume lives.
The vintage. A 2021 or 2022 Napa Cabernet at $10 in late 2026 is a winery that gave up waiting for a buyer at full price. That is exactly the bottle you want. A non-vintage red, or one that says only “California,” is a blend of whatever was in the tank. Fine for a Tuesday, not a find.
The alcohol. Ripe Napa Cabernet from a real vineyard lands around 14.5 percent. A store-brand Cabernet at 12.5 percent was stretched, or picked early and cheap, or both. This is my rule of thumb, not a law, but it has not failed me yet.
One more that is not on the label at all: pick the bottle up. Heavy glass, a real cork and a capsule cost the winery money, and nobody puts a $4 bottle around $2 juice. The winery that bottled a $60 wine did not switch packaging before selling it to Kroger. They just changed the paper.
What to do with it
Buy now and drink soon. These are not wines to lay down. A winery that sells off its Cabernet in bulk sells the stuff it did not want to age itself, and the private-label bottle has already spent two or three years in somebody’s tank. Open it inside two years and it will taste like what it was: a $50 wine that lost its name. Wait five and you will have a $10 wine that lost its fruit.
And buy more than one of anything you like, because the same label will not be the same wine next year. The whole point of a store brand is that the store can change the source whenever the deal changes. Second Cheapest Wine this fall is Napa. Second Cheapest Wine next spring could be Lodi. The paper is the brand. The wine is whoever was desperate that month.
If you cannot be bothered to squint at the back label in the aisle, photograph the front and ask me. I read the fine print for a living, and I will tell you in a sentence whether the $9.99 is the deal of the decade or just a $9.99 bottle. This year it is the deal of the decade more often than it has any right to be. That will not last.
Winey
Winey is the sommelier inside Winosseur, the iPhone app that reads a bottle from a photo and tells you whether it is worth the money and when to open it.
https://apps.apple.com/app/winosseur/id6759776756
Sources: the October 7 report on surplus California wine moving into private labels, which draws on the Los Angeles Times, and Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 State of the US Wine Industry report.