If you work in the wine industry, take a few minutes to share your thoughts and help shape the 2026 DtC wine report. Click here.

Your ongoing participation in our DTC wine surveys and events has been invaluable to the understanding of trends impacting the industry.  Today, you’re invited to participate in our latest DTC survey.   For more than 25 years, we have supported the wine industry with research, analysis and insights.   With your help, we plan to continue. Our new survey will be available until March 30th. To participate in this year’s survey, simply click below.  

The wineries with the most loyal wine clubs aren't the ones with the best discounts. They're the ones with the strongest emotional identity. This will sound counterintuitive to anyone who's ever tried to stem club churn by sweetening the deal with free shipping or an extra bottle. But the data tells a different story. Companies with strong emotional connections to customers outperform competitors' sales growth by 85%. Not 8.5%. Eighty-five percent. The question isn't whether emotional connection matters. It's how you build one. Enter brand archetypes: a framework rooted in Jungian psychology that helps wineries create the kind of deep, identity-based loyalty that discounts can never buy. When wineries align their story, experience, and messaging with a core archetype, wine club loyalty stops being a battle against churn and becomes a natural expression of who they are. What Are Brand Archetypes? (And Why They Work in the Wine Industry) Brand archetypes are 1

The 2026 State of the U.S. Wine Industry Report, published by Silicon Valley Bank and authored by Rob McMillan, provides a comprehensive, data-driven assessment of current conditions in the U.S. wine market. Built on more than 25 years of industry research, the report combines results from SVB’s annual winery survey, its Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) survey, demographic and cohort consumption modeling, and a wide range of third-party wholesale, retail, and population datasets. The conclusion is clear: while the industry continues to face structural headwinds, wineries are not experiencing these conditions equally. A widening performance gap has emerged between those adapting to changing demand and those struggling to do so. 2025 Performance: A Difficult Year for Many By nearly every measure, 2025 was a challenging year for the U.S. wine industry. Roughly half of the surveyed wineries rated the year negatively, citing slowing demand, rising costs, margin pressure, and inventory ch

Just yesterday, more than 500 wineries received a DTC "Success Guide" in their Inboxes, courtesy of Silicon Valley Bank's Wine Division. Enolytics is proud to have contributed our computational power to process and decode a redacted set of SVB survey data, in support of Rob McMillan and his team's creation of the first-ever Success Guide. If you responded to the SVB DTC survey this year, the Success Guide was SVB's way to say Thank You for participating. We're saying Thank You, too, for your part in Enolytics' ongoing efforts to enhance the wine industry's "leveling up" through technology and data analytics in particular. Whether you're using our software, or you're an ENO Insights participant, or we're helping you migrate from one DTC system to another, or you're interested in our wine data literacy course, or you've expressed your interest in some other way... Thank you. It all helps. And the business of wine is getting

The Annual SVB Videocast is next Tuesday, June 17th.  Why should you listen? Prescience. Read below, please. The following is the blog post I made on April 28th, 2019, before the DTC videocast. There hasn't been a single edit. The underscored part is exactly as written 6 years ago. The wine business is far more complex than people think. It's a maze of complexities with different models, varying paths to the consumer, pressure from federal, local, and state regulations, a lack of good information, controlling power in a small numbers of hands and changing consumer demand. Oftentime decisions are made with the love of the product in mind, versus a business decision being made with financial returns in mind. Perhaps the greatest risk we should all be most worried about is our tendency to continue on on a path that's successful. If it works, we keep riding the trend as far as we can, until the strategy fails. In an industry that takes 5 years to get a fully mature y

Please join us on Tuesday, June 17 for our 2025 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report Virtual Event. During this live discussion, our select panel of wine industry leaders will share the latest DTC wine survey findings, breakdown sales and marketing trends and examine tactics to help you navigate our current market conditions.   We’re looking forward to a productive session packed with information that you can put to work at your business. This year’s topics include: Market trends that show glimmers of hopeful news as we progress through the current business cycle. Personalized, community- and experienced-based marketing strategies that are being used to successfully engage with younger consumers. Making sense of the ever-fluctuating wine club, tasting room and wholesale channel sales percentages. The potential benefits of piloting variable, traffic-based tasting fees. Our survey results are based on input from wineries across the US, including the major AVA associations. We

Please join us on Tuesday, June 17, 9:00 am - 10:30am PST for a live, virtual event to review findings and predictions from our 2025 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report. Our panel of wine industry leaders will review the findings from our latest DtC wine survey and share their thoughts on the evolution of the market. During the event, you’ll hear today’s wine sales and marketing trends, examine industry growth strategies and participate in our panel’s Q&A session. A few of the topics we plan to address are:  Market trends that show glimmers of hopeful news as we progress through the current business cycle. Personalized, community- and experienced-based marketing strategies that are being used to successfully engage with younger consumers. Making sense of the ever-fluctuating wine club, tasting room and wholesale channel sales percentages. The potential benefits of piloting variable, traffic-based tasting fees. Our exclusive panel of wine industry innovators will i

Coming to you this week with special invitations for you. Let me set the stage. Not sure if you've noticed but SVB has upped its game this year, in two ways, with its annual DTC survey. One way is the addition of open-ended questions whose answers will be enhanced through AI, then calibrated and verified by Rob McMillan and his team. The second way is their new Success Guide, and it will be available only to people who complete the survey. Which makes sense. Right now, every winery wants to know what they can do - what they need to do - to grow and thrive. But every winery is different, and the formula for success is also different. That's why you'll want to complete the survey. Yes, you'll receive the Success Guide, and only wineries who complete the survey will receive it. It will not be released to the public. You'll also receive the full set of slides that you can benchmark against your own winery. That's what's in it for you, whether or not you're

Rob McMillan of Silicon Valley Bank has for years provided our industry with valuable information based on surveys of industry members It’s now time for the annual Direct-to-Consumer survey to see where that vital marketing channel has been and where it’s going. Any survey is only as good as its respondents, and I urge you to participate, especially so we can get a more robust national picture. Here’s all the information you need. The SVB’s annual Direct-to-Consumer survey is now open To help you prepare, we’ve included this PDF Guide with a preview of the questions. The SVB Annual Direct to Consumer Survey is the grandaddy of surveys. The results are anticipated and used by the entire wine business. Those constituents completing the survey will not only contribute to our understanding of critical wine industry issues and trends, but they will also receive a comprehensive set of survey results, the new Direct-to-Consumer Report, and as an innovative incent