Survival of the smallest: limited-production wineries fare best
Bigger players producing more than 500,000 cases per year saw the largest slump in sales during 2025, reveals shipping company Sovos, while smaller producers were more shielded from the downturn. However, while sales of lower-priced wines plummeted, this “shouldn’t be labelled as premiumisation”, the report cautioned. Here’s why…
One of the key findings in the latest annual Sovos DTC wine report, released this week, is that larger wineries took a greater sucker punch last year than smaller ones in the United States.
Importantly, those producing more than 500,000 cases per year saw a 23% decrease in the volume of wines shipped direct-to-consumer, a bigger drop than any other winery size category.
The report attributed the fall to bigger wineries having “lower average prices”, and added that consumers who purchase cheaper wines “have for three years now retreated from the DTC channel at a faster pace than other purchasers.”
Not necessarily premiumisation
However, Sovos took pains to caution that the trade should not assume this trend is akin to ‘premiumisation’.
“Care should be taken not to label this trend as premiumisation, since that characterisation implies that buyers are trading up to higher-priced wines,” the report explained.
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“Rather, higher-priced wines — and the smaller-sized wineries that tend to produce more of them — are capturing a larger percentage of the DTC shipping channel because fewer lower-priced wines are being shipped.”
‘Mix-shift’
In the report Sovos introduced the term “mix-shift”, which it claimed is a more accurate description for what is currently happening in the DTC sector.
“The change in the mix of wines being shipped, combined with inflation and attempts to recoup increased shipping costs, is shifting the average price per bottle shipped upward,” the shipping company said.
Evidencing this further, the Sovos data shows that in 2025, wineries in the ‘large production’ category saw the average price per bottle shipped increase by 14% from 2024 and experienced a 23% decrease in volume of shipments. Meanwhile, the smallest production size wineries (the limited production category, which produce less than 1,000 cases per year) increased their average price per bottle shipped by a similar 15%. However, this category saw only a 5% diminishment in volume of shipments from 2024.
Small wineries performed best
Those wineries that performed best in terms of both volume and value sales last year belonged to the ‘small wineries’ category, those who produce 4,000 to 499,999 cases per year. Those within this category represent 46% of the total volume of DTC shipments in the US during 2025, and 47% of the total volume.
Pricewise, the average price of a bottle shipped from a ‘small winery’ was $57.71, while the equivalent shipped from a ‘large winery’ was $25.62.
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