MENDOCINO CO., 6/14/26 — Steve Amato is still out working his 38 acres of cabernet off Feliz Creek Road. He prunes. He sprays. He suckers the vines. He mows the grass between the rows so a stray spark has nothing to run on, and when the cold comes the frost sprinklers still kick on. The diesel for his tractors runs him close to $8 a gallon.
What he’s stopped doing is the expensive part. He won’t spend another $10,000 or $20,000 this year tying every vine up tight and pretty the way he did when buyers were still calling for his fruit.
“I used to make sure everything was tied up properly,” he said. “Now I’m just doing the bare minimum to keep it healthy.”
Drive the road down toward the highway, and you can watch how others have dealt with expensive upkeep: in vineyard after vineyard, there’s grass in the rows, wild shoots, vines nobody bothered to tie. Some blocks have gone all the way — nobody prunes them, sprays them or picks them at all. Those are the ones the county is now coming after.
Three weeks ago, on May 19, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 to direct Agricultural Commissioner Angela Godwin to act on the county’s neglected vineyards, which have become holding tanks for mildew, mites and the insects that carry grapevine disease — all of it drifting into blocks next door that may still have a buyer. A new state law, AB 732, lets her fine owners $500 an acre, rising to $1,000 an acre if they don’t make a real cleanup effort within 45 days. Sonoma, Napa and Solano counties are already enforcing the new law.
Amato spoke at that meeting. He’s farmed here five or six years, and these days he scopes for mites and runs extra sprays just to be safe — and not because he can prove anything is blowing off a neighbor’s block. He won’t point at any one of them.
The owners of the vineyard that worried him bought it years ago, he said, and found out afterward it was already diseased, which took the wind out of spending money on it. They’re friendly. They’ve talked about it. And lately they’ve started pulling vines out.
“They’re struggling,” Amato said. “Everybody’s struggling. It’s not that folks don’t want to do this out of laziness. They’re literally bleeding money.”
Years without income
Some Mendocino growers are now three and four years in without selling a crop, he said, and almost no new fruit contracts are coming into the county. Amato saw his own turn coming in 2023, when he hit his contract number and offered his usual 30 extra tons to a buyer from Delicato, one of the big houses. Most years they’d take the overage at a discount.
“They wouldn’t take an extra grape for free,” he said. “That’s when I knew there was a major crisis happening.”
Walking away from a vineyard isn’t free either. “It costs about $40,000 to $50,000 to properly remove a 10-acre block,” Amato said. Cut the vines and they grow right back. He has heard of owners in Napa with cabernet they would happily abandon, except the banks don’t want the land back. “They don’t even want to foreclose on them, because they don’t want to deal with it.”
An owner with no crop, no contract and no loan can’t pay a fine of $500 an acre either.
“You kinda can’t squeeze water from a stone,” Amato said. “Some people are gonna say, whatever. Keep fining me. Take the damn property from me.”
No fines yet as county constructs a process
Reached by email this week, Godwin said the crackdown has barely begun. No one has been fined under AB 732, and she does not expect that to change soon.
“I don’t expect such fines for several months,” she wrote. Her office is still building a due-process timeline, modeled on the county’s own code enforcement and on Napa County’s playbook — a site visit, notice to the owner, then a compliance agreement with firm deadlines to either bring the vineyard up to a minimum standard or pull it out.
The threat may already be doing some of the work. Since the board’s vote, three more properties have been reported, Godwin said, among them a neglected pear orchard with fire blight and a Redwood Valley grower hemmed in by two problem blocks next door. The pear orchard came out as soon as an inspector showed up. One of the two Redwood Valley vineyards was pulled before her staff could even visit. That removal, she wrote, “may have been prompted by the [board] votes and press.” She has no hard acreage numbers yet, but said growers and her own pest-detection specialist are telling her the same thing — more vineyards are coming out “in the past few months since the publicity around AB 732.”
A second clock is running, too. The afternoon after the May vote, Godwin got a call from Sonoma County’s commissioner about the glassy-winged sharpshooter — the disease-carrying insect found this spring in grapevines a Fresno nursery shipped to Costco stores across the state. Chasing those infested plants jumped ahead of the neglected-vineyard work on her desk, and the two problems may be about to meet: state and county officials expect the sharpshooter could surface in exactly these untended blocks, she wrote, with “possible GWSS pocket infestations in these unmonitored vineyards,” within weeks.
Amato also grows cannabis and is president of the Mendocino Cannabis Alliance, so he can watch two economically challenged crops from the same tractor. By the estimates he cites, California has pulled about 40,000 acres of wine grapes in the last few years, and it will take roughly 40,000 more before the growers who remain can sell their crop as they used to.
The wine business has always swung, he said.
“It just goes through these really Keynesian kind of curves, where it’s really hot and you can sell all your grapes, you sell all your bottles, and the price just goes up, up, up and up,” he said. “And all of a sudden, it’s like no one wants merlot for the next five years, and a person’s stuck with a merlot patch.”
This time is different, he said. “It’s like a whole other culture shift, almost.”
Cannabis prices are still soft, he said. But a cannabis farmer can sit out a bad year.
“You just don’t grow that year. You don’t put a crop out. It’s an annual. Grapevines are not.”
“I think wine’s in a much more dangerous spiral,” he said. “There’s more hope on the horizon for cannabis. There’s at least more consumers every day.”
Grants and workshops would benefit everybody
What he wants, more than enforcement, is help — grants to pull vines, workshops on getting by with minimum sprays, maybe the bigger operations pooling pesticide purchases so the small ones pay less. He has no quarrel with Godwin, who he says warned the supervisors herself that the crackdown would bring backlash from people who have nothing left.
The Mendocino growers’ own trade group says some of that help already exists, in a small way. Diego Mendoza, executive director of Mendocino Winegrowers Inc., said the group runs quarterly grower roundtables — working lunches where members swap what’s keeping them afloat and bring in outside experts. A recent one on crop insurance, he said, “saved a few folks’ bacon,” because growers learned they were covered for losses they didn’t know they could claim. Natasha Looney, who works with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sits in to walk growers through government programs.
A year into the job, Mendoza doesn’t oversell it as a grant pipeline. Mostly it’s neighbors pooling what they’ve got. He pointed to one larger ranch that quietly took over the upkeep of a couple of acres next door because the small owner couldn’t — cheaper, he said, than letting a neglected block ruin everyone’s fruit. “It’s really all about talking together, seeking resources together,” he said.
He also drew a line Amato wouldn’t. The worst-neglected vineyards, Mendoza said, tend to belong to absentee owners rather than struggling locals — “hedge funds will buy vineyards and then just kind of abandon them,” with no “social or moral obligation” to the county around them.
“This is all new territory for everybody,” Amato said.
Back at that May 19 supervisors meeting, he put it in one line: the wine business has become “like a falling knife that no one wants to grab.”
No more farm spraying! What a relief for our health.
not as toxic as a hypocrite