Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report, built on survey responses from 450 family wineries, found that top-quartile wineries grew revenue by 22 percent in 2025 while the bottom quartile declined by 13 percent. The median winery had no growth at all. What separated the two groups was not appellation, size, or budget. It was where they aimed their attention.
That gap is the reason this page exists. Most wineries facing a revenue problem reach for a marketing solution, and a good share of them are buying the wrong category of help.
The short version
A marketing agency works on demand. Awareness, discovery, arrival. Website, brand identity, packaging and label design, photography, paid media, PR placements, email infrastructure, trade press.
A guest experience consultant works on what happens once someone is standing in the room. The arrival, the pacing of the flight, the story your hosts tell, the club ask, the consistency between the Tuesday host and the Saturday host.
Both are legitimate spends. They address different failures, and the cost of choosing wrong is that the money disappears without any obvious failure to point at.
What the data says about where wineries are misspending
The SVB report is unusually direct on this. Reservation data from Commerce7, covering 363 wineries on a trailing twelve-month basis through March 2026, shows visitation declining at an average of 2.12 percent year over year with no sustained period of recovery. The decline crosses regions and winery types, and the report reads it as a broad shift in consumer behavior rather than a problem any single property can fix locally.
Despite that, low performers are 2.3 times more likely than top performers to name tasting room changes as their primary strategy. The report frames this as a belief that the facility, layout, reservation system, or staffing model is the problem, and that renovating or upgrading will bring customers back. It does not agree.
The same pattern shows up in pricing. Low-performing wineries are more than twice as likely to cite price cuts and discounting as their primary strategy, while successful wineries are 60 percent more likely to raise bottle prices. Of the 15.5 percent of wineries that lowered tasting fees, a quarter saw visitation improve and another quarter saw it stabilize, while the remaining 47 percent saw no improvement or could not yet tell.
The wine club numbers show the squeeze most clearly. Average acquisition of 26 percent is nearly cancelled by attrition of 22 percent, leaving net membership close to flat. Net club growth has fallen from 13 percent in 2021 to 2 percent in 2025. Meanwhile the lifetime value of a single club member reached $2,803 in 2025, the highest in the report’s fifteen-year history.
So each member you fail to sign, and each one you fail to keep, is worth close to three thousand dollars over time, in a year when the pool of visitors to sign them from is shrinking.
How to tell which problem you have
Separate your visitor count from your conversion rate and look at them as two independent numbers over the same period.
If your conversion rate is falling faster than your traffic, the room is the problem. Renovating it or discounting the flight will not reach that, and the data above suggests both are what struggling wineries reach for first.
If your traffic is falling much faster than the regional trend and your conversion holds when anyone does arrive, you have a demand problem. That is agency work.
If both are sliding at roughly the industry rate, treat conversion as the more actionable of the two. Regional visitation is largely outside your control. What happens in the ninety minutes after someone parks is not.
Four signals point at the floor rather than the funnel.
Three hosts tell three different versions of how the winery started. Not different styles, different facts. Ownership rarely catches this, because ownership hears the version told by the person who tells it correctly.
Reviews praise specific staff members by name and say little about the wine or the place. Warm reviews are pleasant. Reviews that only remember the person mean the experience leaves when that host takes another job.
Conversion varies sharply by day of week. That is a staffing and consistency issue.
Guests taste through the flight, say they loved it, buy two bottles, and decline the club. The wine landed. The reason to come back did not.
What a marketing agency does better than anyone else
Worth stating plainly, because a comparison page written by a consultant tends to conclude that the consultant is always the answer.
Hire an agency when the work is production or distribution at scale. A full website rebuild. Packaging and label redesign. A PR campaign aimed at national wine press. Paid search and paid social. E-commerce and DTC email infrastructure. Wholesale and distributor-facing materials.
Agencies have designers, developers, media buyers, and press relationships. A one-person advisory practice does not and should not pretend otherwise. If your website is eight years old and your labels look tired, an agency is the correct spend and a guest experience audit will not help you.
There is a real argument for advertising specifically. The report puts the total US wine-producing population at 11,691. Barbara Gorder of the Sonoma Valley consultancy Undisclosed Location, quoted in Forbes coverage of the report, argues that competition at that density forces wineries to advertise in ways they previously did not have to. That is a fair point, and it argues for agency spend rather than against it.
What a guest experience consultant does
The work is narrower and goes deeper into one part of the business.
A guest experience audit is an unannounced visit made as an ordinary guest, walking the full arrival-to-departure path a first-time visitor experiences. Parking and signage, the first sixty seconds inside, how the flight is introduced, how the story is told or skipped, how the club is raised, how the departure is handled. It comes back as a written findings report with the gaps ordered by what each one appears to be costing.
The anonymity is the point. An announced visit produces the performance rather than the pattern. Owners rarely see their own floor on an ordinary Tuesday, because the floor changes the moment the owner is standing on it.
Staff storytelling work follows from that. The goal is not a script. Scripts fail the moment a guest asks something the script did not anticipate, and guests can hear a script anyway. The goal is that every host knows the same true material well enough to tell it in their own words, so the story survives turnover and rotating shifts.
Narrative work extends the same material into channels the winery already has. Wine club letters, newsletter, social. It adds to existing marketing rather than replacing it.
The report describes what high performers do in terms that line up with this. They treat the tasting room as an acquisition engine rather than an endpoint, and they measure it by conversion rates, relationship building, and how guests rate their experience. Asked what they were doing differently, the top quartile described emphasizing one-on-one tastings and curated experiences that raise spend per guest. The bottom quartile described adding more events to drive traffic.
The part of the report that argues against me
Honesty requires including this. McMillan is critical of wineries whose plan for the year is the same playbook as the last thirty years, which he lists as facility investment, re-upping training, and creating new experiences to attract visitors. He calls that doubling down on a diminishing opportunity.
The distinction worth drawing is between training aimed at attracting more visitors, which the report doubts, and execution aimed at converting and keeping the ones who already arrive, which the report supports. Those are not the same investment, though they get sold under similar names.
The report’s own answer to what comes next sits partly outside the tasting room altogether. Traveling club events in member markets, on-the-road tastings, shipped tasting kits, private events where members already live, participation in regional community events. Any winery weighing an audit against an agency should know that the analyst behind these numbers thinks the more important question is what a second revenue stream looks like.
Sequence
Most wineries eventually need both. The order determines whether the money works.
A room that converts well turns every additional visitor into compounding value. A room that does not turns every additional visitor into a bottle sale and a goodbye. That argues for addressing conversion before buying more traffic, particularly when the traffic itself is expensive to buy and regionally in decline.
The exception is a winery genuinely nobody can find. If visits are a trickle and the room converts well when anyone shows up, demand generation is the right first spend.
Can you do this yourself?
Often, and it is worth trying before hiring anyone.
Send someone your staff does not know, on a busy Saturday, with instructions to say nothing about who sent them. Have them write down what they were told about the winery’s history, whether the club was raised and how, and what they would tell a friend the next day. Do that on three separate days with three different hosts, then compare the accounts.
Most owners find the answer uncomfortable enough to act on without paying anyone. The reasons to hire out are bandwidth, distance, and the fact that a friend doing you a favor will soften what they report.
Hotels, inns, and restaurants
The same division holds outside wine. For a boutique hotel, an agency drives OTA presence, site conversion, and paid channels, while the front desk, the arrival, and the story of the property determine direct bookings and return stays. For a restaurant, an agency handles listings, PR, and reach, while the table-side conversation and the host stand determine whether a first visit becomes a regular.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a marketing agency fix wine club conversion?
What does a guest experience audit include?
How much does each cost?
Do I need both?
Is the tasting room still worth investing in at all?
Sources
Silicon Valley Bank, 2026 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report, June 2026, author Rob McMillan, SVB Wine Division (a division of First Citizens Bank). Survey conducted March 3 to April 3, 2026, 450 responses, all data points reflecting 2025 annual figures, margin of sampling error ±5 percent at 95 percent confidence. Visitation data courtesy of Commerce7. Barbara Gorder quoted in Forbes coverage of the report, June 2026.
Patrick R. Dunn runs Vianarra, a hospitality storytelling practice for winery owners, tasting room managers, and boutique hotel GMs, offering guest experience audits, staff storytelling workshops, and a twelve-month brand narrative program. He spent more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger and is WSET Level 3 certified.
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