(Wines&Vines) - Each year, Turrentine Brokerage publishes the Turrentine Outlook, an exhaustive survey of the market and supply of wine grapes and bulk wine with follow-up updates.

The document was sent to customers and subscribers this morning, and Steve Fredricks, president of the brokerage, provided Wines & Vines a peek at rare information: The data for the parts of the North Coast AVA that aren’t in widely discussed Napa, Sonoma or Marin counties.

This data includes Mendocino and Lake counties and the Suisun Valley AVA in Solano County. Information excerpted from the report is important both to those who grow grapes in these regions and to winery customers seeking less expensive grapes to augment their Napa and Sonoma supply—or to offer less pricy wines.

Though more acres are still planted to Chardonnay in the regions, Cabernet is more valuable. Most wineries that market Cabernet Sauvignon with a North Coast appellation on the label source at least a majority of the blend from Lake County and/or Mendocino County.

When wineries that use a Napa Valley or Sonoma County appellation cannot obtain all of the fruit they need from those areas—especially at the right price—they often turn to Lake and Mendocino counties for the 15% out-of-appellation permitted to viticultural appellations or the 25% permitted to political appellations.

This move helps Lake and Mendocino county growers when grapes are tight, but when supply is plentiful, the Napa and Sonoma County wineries often reduce their use of out-of-appellation grapes.

That’s the case at present. After three above-average harvests in the North Coast, the market in Mendocino and Lake counties as well as parts of Suisun Valley in the North Coast appellation has softened, according to the Turrentine report.

Consumer sales of Cabernet Sauvignon between $15 and $20 are still growing at 10%, according to Nielsen scan data. Competition, however, is also heating up, including wine from Paso Robles, Lodi, Washington, Chile and the Languedoc region of southern France.

Some historical observations: Consumption of Cabernet Sauvignon grew during the recession of 2008 through 2010, but consumers traded down in price: Brands retailing for less than $9, and especially less than $6, enjoyed strong growth.

This created a difficult market for Cabernet Sauvignon grapes and bulk wines from Mendocino County, Lake County and Suisun Valley, which are typically priced higher than those retail prices will support.

More recently, however, the slow economic recovery combined with increasing consumer confidence led consumers to trade up again. This has resulted in increasing demand for North Coast grapes and wines in bulk for the past two years.

This situation makes for severe swings in value as the wine business moves through shortage and excess.

Bearing acres will increase during the next several years, but this will be partially offset by a probable return to more typical yields per acre for established plantings. New plantings, however, often return higher yields.