Files
Abstract
The California Grape Crush Report includes summaries of quantities produced and estimates of
the average prices and value of wine grapes crushed in California, and serves as an authoritative
source of information on production and returns per ton by variety of wine grapes. The data
provided in the Crush Report are used to calculate the total value of winegrape production as
reported in the annual Agricultural Statistics reports published by the United States Department
of Agriculture and in major industry publications. We use the differences among crush districts
in the shares of production crushed to growers’ accounts to show that the current mechanism of
calculating average statewide returns per ton understates the true total value of the crush by 4–16
percent. We show that a more accurate estimate of the total value and average price can be
obtained if the prices of the wine grapes that are sold are used to infer the prices of wine grapes
that are not sold before computing the weighted averages.