Bank report finds Napa Valley wineries face stagnant visitation

Napa County's wine tasting rooms are still seeing fewer visitors according to a new report, although the wine industry's overall sales decline is slowing.

A sharp sales slump after the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be leveling off, according to the June 2026 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report from Silicon Valley Bank's Wine Division, which is based on spring survey responses from 450 family wineries throughout the U.S. Rob McMillan, the report's author and founder of SVB's Wine Division, described the moment as a turning point, but not yet a turnaround.

"The market is showing early indications of stabilizing," McMillan wrote. "But … stabilization is not recovery. There's no indication of a return to improving demand. Things feel different, not better - not yet."

Overall tasting room reservations have declined for more than a year on a trailing 12-month basis, according to data from the booking platform Commerce7. The average year-over-year drop was about 2.1% across 363 wineries tracked from December 2024 through March 2026, with no sustained recovery period during that stretch.

At the same time, the Napa Valley remains the most expensive place in the country to taste wine. The average standard tasting fee in Napa is $79, compared with a national average of $39. Napa's average reserve tasting fee of $125 is also the highest in the survey, well above the $70 national average.

Napa wines, the report adds, carry the highest suggested retail bottle price of any region, averaging $103.15, compared with $63.66 in Sonoma and roughly $40 nationally.

Napa wineries also reported the highest average of purchases from tasting room visitors in the country at $454, compared with an overall average of $197. That figure has stayed roughly steady since 2022, when it reached $488 during a post-pandemic spending peak.

On pricing strategy, the report notes that Napa and Sonoma wineries were more likely than most regions to lower tasting fees in 2025 - 29% of Napa respondents and 30% of Sonoma respondents reported a reduction compared with rates ranging from 4% to 20% elsewhere. Among wineries nationally that lowered fees, about a quarter said visitation clearly improved, another 27% said visitation stabilized, and the remainder reported no improvement or inconclusive results.

A central theme of the report is that wineries doing well and wineries struggling are taking different approaches to such strategies as events, pricing changes, club programs and tasting room updates. McMillan describes it as a divide between wineries focused on customers and relationships versus those focused on costs and operations.

"How do we understand what our target consumer wants and get them to want what we're selling?" is the question high-performing winery managers ask, according to the report, while struggling wineries tend to ask, "With our costs rising, how do we make what we're selling cheaper to produce?"

Wineries in the top tier of the report's performance ranking saw revenue grow by 22% over the past year, while those in the bottom tier saw revenue decline by 13%. The typical winery, according to the report, saw no growth.

Wine club performance, long a pillar of Napa's direct-to-consumer model, also showed strain.

Nationally, net club membership growth slowed to 2% in both 2024 and 2025, down from 13% in 2021. In Napa, club membership declined 4% year-over-year in 2025, with wineries losing an average of 524 members against 438 new members acquired, a net loss of 86 members per winery.

Napa's average club member tenure was 41 months in 2025, among the longest of any region, just ahead of Sonoma's 40 months. Longer tenure tends to mean higher lifetime value, the report states, which rose nationally to $2,803 per club member in 2025, the highest figure the report has recorded.

Direct-to-consumer sales remain central to winery revenue, accounting for about 70% of total revenue across the dataset. Napa wineries derive about 66% of sales through the channel, slightly below the 67% national average.

McMillan suggested that relying on the traditional tasting-room model alone may not be enough going forward. The report points to a small group of wineries experimenting with reaching customers beyond the tasting room, through traveling tastings, virtual events, shipped tasting kits, and more direct outreach to club members between shipments.

"It is time to evolve again," McMillan wrote. "We don't have the full answer yet. Nobody does. But the early signals are in the data, and they're coming from the people willing to try something different."

The full report is available through SVB's Wine Division at svb.com/wine.

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