(WesternFarmPress) - California agricultural appraiser Ben Slaughter knows his audience and is careful not to get too nuts when making recommendations.

So how is it that the senior appraiser with Correia-Xavier in Fresno, Calif. wasn’t run out of a room full of wine grape growers at a meeting of the San Joaquin Valley Winegrowers Association when he started talking up the positive value of almonds?

Could it be some of those wine grape growers themselves have almonds in their agricultural portfolios and understand the facts?

Slaughter understands his audience and knows that global market conditions and the San Joaquin Valley’s rich soil and Mediterranean Climate have made it easier to profit from almonds than grapes. Still he’s not bearish on grapes, even within a Valley that has seen more than its share of vineyards pulled and replaced with trees.

Outside of the San Joaquin Valley vineyard values remain strong, according to Slaughter.

“The financials over the last few years in Napa and Sonoma are absolutely fantastic, because they’ve allowed some of these guys to hang five, six, seven tons, and get $2,500 a ton,” Slaughter said.

As vineyard financials remained bullish, so too have land prices.

Slaughter has seen land in Napa wine country trade for between $250,000 and $400,000 an acre, though that admittedly is the high-end of the range and is not reflected in some of the more recent sales as his data suggest a slight cooling of prices.

Still that’s not hard to imagine with an average Cabernet price of $6,000 per ton in the region that can yield four tons per acre.

For high-end wines at or above $100 per bottle, Slaughter says grapes “will easily sell for $8,000 a ton and up.