"What happened in DtC shipping in 2025 wasn't subtle or selective. It was systemic. While many of these market shifts and economic conditions are outside the wine industry's control, consumer engagement is not," said Alex Koral, regulatory general counsel, Sovos ShipCompliant.
The direct-to-consumer wine shipping channel just posted the worst year in the 17-year history of the industry's benchmark study. The 2026 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Shipping Report from Sovos ShipCompliant and WineBusiness Analytics found that DtC shipments contracted by 967,000 cases and more than $230 million in 2025, a 15 percent drop in volume and a 6 percent decline in value.
"What happened in DtC shipping in 2025 wasn't subtle or selective. It was systemic. While many of these market shifts and economic conditions are outside the wine industry's control, consumer engagement is not," said Alex Koral, regulatory general counsel, Sovos ShipCompliant.
The report's authors had hoped 2025 might bring stabilization after two years of decline. Instead the contraction accelerated to the fastest rate in the study's 17-year history. Koral's read is that DtC, which has historically amplified broader market trends, is not insulated from the industry's headwinds and may be feeling them more acutely than any other channel.
The pain hit the largest wineries hardest
The largest wineries suffered the most. Producers making more than 500,000 cases a year saw a 23 percent decrease in DtC shipment volume, the steepest drop of any size category. No wine type escaped: every varietal tracked by the report shipped lower volumes than in 2024.
The least expensive wines lost the most volume. Buyers of lower-priced bottles are dropping out of the DtC channel in greater numbers than buyers of higher-priced wines, a mix shift that pushed the average price per bottle shipped up 11 percent even as fewer people bought wine. It runs counter to the premiumization narrative. Higher-priced wines are capturing a larger share of a shrinking channel because the value buyer is leaving.
The average shipped bottle now costs nearly $57, with Napa averaging about $100 a bottle and Sonoma about $38, according to a Sovos analysis cited in industry coverage. Wine priced at $15 a bottle saw the steepest volume losses, confirming that the shoppers exiting the channel are the price-sensitive ones.
Napa held value while California bled
Napa County wineries were the outlier. Despite lower volumes, Napa added 1 percent to the value of its DtC shipments in 2025 while losing 8 percent of volume, far below the channel's overall 15 percent volume decline.
The rest of the state told a different story. California, the most common destination for wine shipments, lost $142 million in shipments, accounting for 62 percent of the channel's total value loss. Outside Napa, the Rest of California region saw shipment volume fall 32 percent, leaving it 47 percent below 2021 levels. California's share of DtC destination volume slipped to 28 percent from 29 percent.
Even the bright spots are dimming
Dan Panella, co-owner of Oak Farm Vineyards in Lodi, spent four years building a restaurant-style food operation to lift DtC sales to about 10,000 cases, roughly a third of production. "There really has been a little bit of a downturn," Panella said. His experience captures the report's warning: DtC, once the best-performing part of the market, has stopped being the best performing.
Eight states managed positive value growth, led by Alaska at 93 percent, alongside Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Michigan and Wyoming. Very small wineries producing 1,000 to 4,999 cases a year were the only size group to post a value uptick, driven by a 15 percent rise in average bottle price to $79.34 even as their volume slipped 12 percent.
The engagement lever
The channel's pain is broad but not uniform. Wineries that invested in food programs, events and club experiences held up better than those relying on passive email lists, a pattern visible in Oak Farm's story and in the tasting room data. The report's data on eight states with positive value growth, led by Alaska at 93 percent, suggests that where wineries showed up with engagement, buyers still showed up with wallets.
The structural worry is the buyer mix. With value-tier shoppers exiting fastest, the channel is becoming more premium and more concentrated, a smaller number of wealthier buyers carrying more of the volume. That concentration raises the stakes of every relationship: losing one $100-a-bottle buyer now hurts more than it did when the channel was full of $30-a-bottle shoppers.
What wineries can still control
The report places the decline within the macro pressures facing the U.S. wine market, where on-premise and off-premise sales also fell in 2025. But Koral's framing points to the one lever wineries own: consumer engagement. In a channel that once outpaced the overall market on the way up and is now contracting faster on the way down, the wineries that keep buyers engaged will decide how deep the downturn goes.