Enolytics Grant Research: DTC Comparisons

The Virginia Wine Board Grant: Enolytics

From April 2024 to March 2025, the Virginia Wine Board funded a grant with Enolytics to provide research to Virginia wineries on Direct-to-Consumer information on sales and comparative data against national winery research of the same.

Enolytics attempted to identify and, with permission from participating wineries, collect and use aggregate data to provide benchmark information for VA wineries. There was no cost to wineries to participate. Vinoshipper data was added in 2025 to supplement winery information.

During the project, Enolytics experienced difficulties enlisting winery participation, compounded by the unexpected consolidation of two main DTC providers, which cut off a primary data source for this grant.

Two recommendations emerged from the project:

1. Train tasting room staff to gather customer data. Almost 37% of transactions in Tasting Rooms occur under the “Guest Account,” meaning that the sale is not assigned to a particular customer and the opportunity to follow up is lost.
2. Train web teams on website optimization, traffic, abandoned carts, etc, to reverse declining website sales in Virginia, capitalizing on the primary target markets project data revealed: Washington DC, Charlotte, Baltimore, Houston, and Atlanta.

Additionally, key insights from the project include:

• During the project period, price increases drove revenue growth despite lower volume.
• The Website channel is underutilized: high order values show consumers are willing to buy online. The Tasting Room is Virginia’s largest DTC channel despite lowest AOV compared to Wine Club or Website sales.
• The October Wine Month peak in Tasting Rooms offers an opportunity to invite lucrative wine club signups and gather information for future Website sales
• Women, especially Millennials and Gen X, purchase Virginia wine. Demographically, Virginia continues to perform well with younger consumers (especially Millennials) relative to other East Coast wineries.
• In addition to the expected Virginia winery shipping destination cities of Washington DC, Charlotte, Baltimore, Houston and Atlanta, Vinoshipper’s list also included “curveballs” like Lawrence, New York (in Nassau County on Long Island), Milwaukee and Mount Prospect, Illinois (northwest of Chicago). More generally, East Coast wineries’ top Metro Areas are further afield, including New York, Philadelphia and San Jose, California

Reports provided during the grant remain available below.

Q1 2024

• Baseline Report on DTC sales from Virginia wineries
• Presentation Report on DTC sales from Virginia wineries
• Full Report on DTC sales comparison from Virginia wineries

Q2 2024

• Executive Summary
• Virginia Quarterly Report – 3 year comparison 
• Virginia DTC Data Collective FAQ

Q3 2024

• Executive Summary 
• Full Report Q3 Data
• Enolytics briefing to the Virginia Wineries Association on 11/11/24

Q4 2024

• Full Report Q4