Everyone keeps telling you the wine market is dying. It isn’t. What’s happening is far more revealing. When pressure shows up, some wineries respond with discipline. Others respond with panic. And panic has a price.
Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 State of the US Wine Industry Report just handed us the clearest data point I’ve seen in years: top quartile wineries grew revenue 22% in 2025. The median winery was flat. The bottom quartile fell 13%. Same market. Same tariffs. Same consumer pullback. Wildly different outcomes.
So what separates the top from the bottom? It’s not luck, and it’s not location. It’s pricing discipline. Top quartile wineries were 60% more likely to raise bottle prices last year. Bottom quartile wineries were more than twice as likely to cut prices as their core strategy. That’s the opposite of what most people expect. The wineries doing best in a contracting market are charging more, not less. The wineries struggling are discounting their way toward the exit.
I see this same pattern every week with our clients. The instinct when sales soften is to drop price, run a promo, chase volume. It feels like action. It is actually the fastest way to erode margin, train your list to wait for sales, and confirm to the market that your wine was never worth full price to begin with.
The best wineries aren’t pretending the market is easy. They’re just refusing to let fear dictate their strategy. Here is what the top performers are doing instead.
Protecting the bottle price and discounting the experience. Free shipping, a bonus bottle with a case, a bundle. The price on the label stays intact. Perceived value stays intact.
Treating the wine club as the business, not a side channel. Monthly touchpoints, real retention strategy, not a quarterly shipment and a prayer.
Cutting underperforming SKUs at the label level. Not “we’ll figure out margin later.” Profitability analyzed label by label, and the losers get cut.
Taking the brand to the customer instead of waiting for the customer to come to them. Virtual tastings, shipped tasting kits, private events in the cities where club members already live.
None of these decisions are driven by panic. They’re driven by long-term confidence in the brand they’re building. None of this requires a bigger budget. It requires the discipline to not panic when a case count dips. Here’s the part nobody wants to hear: this divide is going to widen before it narrows. SVB’s own read is that the industry doesn’t hit zero growth again until 2027 or 2028, and the contraction between now and then is going to come disproportionately from the bottom quartile exiting the category entirely.
If your default move under pressure is cutting price, you are not weathering the storm. You are speeding toward the group that doesn’t make it to the other side.
In 2025, In Good Co. supported $2M+ in wholesale POs for clients who held price and built real routes to market instead of discounting their way into distributor shelves. That wasn’t luck. It was discipline.
Every difficult market exposes character. Some wineries panic. They cut prices, chase volume, and slowly teach customers their wine is worth less.
Others protect the value they’ve spent years building.
That is the price of panic.
The market is not your problem. How you respond to it is.
Wine loves company🍷
