Production never stopped. Alcohol falls under the Food and Agriculture sector on the federal critical-infrastructure list, so when California's stay-at-home order came down in March, production and distribution kept running while the tasting rooms, restaurants, and bars went dark. There's a letter in my glovebox certifying that I'm essential, in case anyone asks. Nobody has asked.
The strange part is what happened to demand. People didn't stop buying wine; they stopped buying it in restaurants. On-premise sales are down about seventy percent from last year. Off-premise wine is up forty-four. E-commerce is running five or six times its normal volume, and club shipments keep climbing. The total has held up better than anyone guessed in mid-March, but it's all in the wrong places. Every forecast we built before this is fiction now. We rebuild them weekly, because the March actuals broke every model we had, and weekly is the honest interval.
So April has been a month of killing orders and chasing others. Kegs and food-service cases sit in the warehouse with nowhere to go while the grocery SKUs move out faster than we can expedite them. Glass lead times keep slipping, the conversation about cans has started, and two trucking quotes on the same lane can come back a third apart. It's the same planning work as before, done over, in a market that moved.
The production floor runs on split crews now: staggered shifts, temperature checks at the door, six-foot marks taped on the concrete, so one positive case doesn't shut the whole line. Meetings that used to be a walk across the floor happen on Zoom. Elsewhere in the industry, more than five hundred distilleries are making hand sanitizer under a federal waiver — the WHO formula, around eighty percent ethanol. That's about a quarter of the distilleries in the country, retooled inside a month.
Outside of work, it's the stillness I notice. Last year had Peru, a trade show abroad, a gym habit I'd finally made stick. This year the calendar is empty. The gym is closed. Yesterday the price of oil went negative, sellers paying buyers to take the barrels off their hands, and gas is the cheapest it's been in years with nowhere to drive to. Freeway traffic is down by almost half and the sky is clearer than I can remember seeing it. The one drive I still make is south, and it has never been faster.
Some of this suits me, and I'm not sure what to do with that. No commute, the week porous in a way it hasn't been since school. I cook more, sleep more, and some days the calls are finished by mid-afternoon and the rest of the day is mine. Meanwhile the on-premise half of this industry is furloughing people, and friends who work in restaurants are filing claims on a website that keeps crashing. I'm busy and safe because of where I happened to be standing when the music stopped. The schedule is the upside nobody asked for, and I take it anyway.
Nobody knows how long this lasts. Everyone says "when this is over" and means June. I rebuild forecasts for a living, every week now, and I've stopped putting dates on anything.
— Lo