The Virginia Wine Board Grant: Enolytics
The Virginia Wine Board has 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 will identify, and with permission from wineries that use certain POS systems (WineDirect, Commerce7, vinSUITE, eCellar, OrderPort), collect and use aggregate data to provide benchmark information for VA wineries. There is no cost to wineries to participate. All aggregate data reports are also free to VA wineries.
Winery participation is free and encouraged; it includes all aggregated reports and a daily report at no cost. Contact Enolytics at VirginiaDTCdata@enolytics.com to express your interest. Please indicate the DTC system you use.
Enolytics compiled 1st Quarter data and gave a report on that information on July 11th. The deck from that meeting as well as the in-depth report on those results are linked below.
Year-to-date sales data from the newly-available second quarter report reveal that despite higher prices, Virginia’s average order value (AOV) is $10 below that of East Coast wineries. Enolytics recommends targeting website sales to address that gap. Highlights from the first quarter report include:
- Virginia is doing well: Though selling less wine (volume is down 11% YoY), revenue increased by 2%. In fact, AOV increased 7% despite 2% fewer discounts, due to price increases.
- Regardless, we have room for improvement in tasting rooms, websites, and club sales, and in their relative ratio. Specifically, shifting emphasis from the tasting room to the website and the wine club and reducing use of the guest account (currently, 35% of Virginia tasting room transactions) may increase revenue.
- Critically: tasting room volume is down; this is the origin point for future sales. Further, though tasting rooms generate more than half of VA net sales, their the AOV is lower than website or wine club sales, possibly due to the % of BTG sales.
- Website sales were significantly down (by 32%) YOY in Q1, and at 7%, are below the national average of 10%. In VA, website sales are mostly visitor follow on.
- Wine club sales, which typically offer high ROI, are only 1/3 of VA’s net sales and signups are lowest in 3 years. Wine club bottle prices were flat even as tasting room bottle prices increased by 15%. Emphasizing club purchases can increase AOV and ROI.
- Women buy Virginia wine. 53% of VA’s consumers are women; millenials and GenX also over index in women. The DC/NoVa area buys most Virginia wine, followed by Charlottesville, Richmond, New York, and Virginia Beach/Norfolk
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
As other reports are posted, they will be linked on this page.