Mid-October saw the California table grape season entering the home stretch, enjoying strong demand from both domestic and global markets. Fruit quality, although generally good, was erratic, prompting exporters to carefully select their lots for good arrival in foreign markets.
“The drought has had an impact on fruit quality to some extent this season but not enough to hurt export demand,” Todd Bassett, a table grape inspector for both domestic and export markets, told Fruitnet. “Movement has been strong all season so I expect the deal to clean up steadily over the next couple of months.”
Anticipating this, there are reports that many shrewd exporters are buying up the top-quality fruit at still reasonable prices and putting it away in private cold storage for late-season shipment when the market moves far higher.
The California table grape industry set a record for shipments in 2013 at more than 116m cartons. It’s a possibility that shipped volume could exceed that level again in 2014.
“The volume here is huge this year – very similar to last season,” Bassett said. “If it wasn’t for a very hot summer [in the San Joaquin Valley], I’m sure that there would have been even more cartons packed.”
“My sense of things is that it will be no more than 115m cartons this year,” Brian Crettol of Jasmine Vineyards told Fruitnet. “ But it’s almost certain to be [the industry’s] second-largest deal ever in terms of volume.”
“The industry’s packout should be fairly similar to last year’s – maybe a little less,” said John Harley of Anthony Vineyards. “The ‘wild card’ in the deal is all these new varieties coming into maturity; that alone could boost this deal to the level of last year. Another factor to consider is that there is no longer a juice market [for wine blending] for growers to consider, as cheap imports from countries such as Argentina have taken over in the last few years. So now everything of decent quality gets packed and that alone could kick up shipped volume. Personally, I’m thinking this deal is somewhere between 110m and 112m cartons. We’ll see…”
According to the USDA, Scarlet Royal led all varieties in availability at more than 2.6m cartons (8.62kg), followed by Autumn King (1.9m), Red Globe (907,000), Crimson Seedless (757,000) and Autumn Royal (552,000).
