Shrinking demand for alcoholic beverages has led to an oversupply of wine.

In response, some vineyard operators in Australia, California, and France are eliminating large sections of their vineyards.

A South Australian grower, Tony Townsend, recently informed Bloomberg that he’s dismantling his 34-acre vineyard despite years of vine maintenance.

“While I loved being a part of the wine industry, continuing in this state just wasn’t financially feasible,” he explained to the news source. Despite his crops being healthy, the harvest expense would have been $23,000.

Townsend’s not alone. Reuters reported tens of millions of vines will be ripped out in Australia to address the excess supply. As of last year, the amount of extra wine in storage in Australia was equal to two years of production, the outlet said, with some going bad before it could be sold.

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“It feels like an era is ending,” vineyard owner Andrew Calabria of Calabria Wines in Australia told Reuters, adding: “It’s hard for growers to look out the back window and see a pile of dirt instead of vines that have been there as long as they’ve known.”

Excess supply is also impacting winemakers in Europe and the US.

Last year, the French government, known for its efforts to protect its traditional culinary products, declared that it would invest $216 million in discarding excess wine to help the struggling industry. Rather than being ingested, this wine would be transformed into industrial alcohol for items like perfume, hand sanitizer, and cleaning solutions.

France is also financing initiatives by growers in Bordeaux to remove about 10% of their vines.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that some growers in California are demolishing their vineyards, with some choosing to cultivate other crops as an alternative.

One of the factors contributing to the overproduction is merely a shift in demand: People don’t drink the way they used to.

Wine consumption rose in the ’90s when many believed it to be associated with good health, but as Americans have drunk less and less alcohol over the past decade, production has exceeded demand, the Chronicle reported.

“People in this business took it for granted that there was always going to be growth,” Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers in California, told the outlet.

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