I spent years working as a CFO and accountant before building Crafted ERP. In that time, I saw one pattern repeat itself across industries: the businesses that survived downturns weren’t always the biggest or the best-funded. They were the ones who knew their numbers — and knew them in time to act.
That pattern is playing out right now in the U.S. wine industry, and the stakes have rarely been higher.
Two major reports published in 2026 — the Azur Associates Annual Summary & 2026 Outlook and the 2026 BMO Wine Market Report — tell the same story from different angles. The total U.S. wine market is in a period of decline.
According to BMO, there are 50% more U.S. wineries than a decade ago, yet market volume is roughly the same as it was then. That math doesn’t resolve without a significant shakeout — and the shakeout is already underway.
What the BMO report also found, and what I think deserves more attention, is this: thousands of wineries grew in 2025 anyway. The report describes them as “leaner, more efficient and leveraging new technology to do more and faster than ever.”
The Azur report frames the common thread in even sharper terms: “Those who know best how to access and apply the right data will have a distinct advantage over time. The more you measure, the more you manage.”
That’s not just good advice. For the winery operators I talk to, it’s increasingly a matter of survival. Here are the three areas where winery data matters most right now.
Your Inventory Problem is a Winery Data Problem
Inventory has always been complicated in wine. Barrels take time. Assemblages take judgment. Aged vintages have traditionally been treated as assets — something to hold and release at a premium when the market is ready.
That logic has inverted.
The 2026 BMO report found that less than 25% of U.S. wineries report no excess inventory. Among larger producers, 42% are carrying between 5% and 20% of their total inventory from previous vintages.
Lenders who once treated barrel inventory as collateral now view unsold prior vintages as trapped working capital with price and exit risk. The industry hit nearly 22 months of inventory supply in 2023. Getting back to an 18-month equilibrium requires sustained, disciplined reduction.
You can’t reduce inventory you can’t fully see. That sounds obvious, but the reality for most wineries is that their winery data lives across multiple spreadsheets, a winery management system, an accounting platform, and someone’s clipboard in the barrel room. By the time it’s reconciled, it’s already outdated.
Real-time winery data means knowing what’s in barrel, what’s in tank, what’s committed to wholesale orders, and what’s aging past its window — all from the same platform, all updated as transactions happen. That’s the difference between making informed production decisions and making educated guesses.
Distribution Has Changed. Your Winery Data Needs to Keep Up.
The distributor landscape shifted dramatically in 2025. Republic National Distributing Company exited the California market, and Reyes Beverage Group is acquiring operations in 11 states. Nearly a quarter of all wineries surveyed by BMO lost a primary distributor in 2025, rising to 31% in California. The three-tier system that supported decades of wine growth has fundamentally changed.
The new distributor model is velocity-first. Wholesalers are rationalizing portfolios based on item-level performance, cutting SKUs that don’t move and reducing sales support for suppliers who can’t demonstrate consistent execution. As the Azur report notes, wholesalers have “largely become fulfillment providers,” and winery sales teams now carry the account management burden that distributors used to share.
This shift creates a real problem for wineries without their own winery data infrastructure. If your visibility into what’s moving through which distributor, in which accounts, at what velocity depends on waiting for the wholesaler to share a report, you’re already behind. By the time the data arrives, the window to act on it has often closed.
Wineries that navigate this landscape well will have real-time access to distributor inventory, depletion data, and shipment history on their side of the relationship. They’re not waiting for their wholesaler to tell them what’s happening. They’re managing.
DTC is Your Most Controllable Channel. Your Winery Data Should Reflect That.
DTC shipment volume dropped 15% in 2025, pulling the channel back to volume levels last seen in 2016. In dollar terms, it has contracted to roughly where it was in 2020. Since then, shipping costs have spiked, and wine club retention is harder than it was during the pandemic surge. The BMO report notes that growth in the channel is now concentrated almost entirely in bottles priced above $50.
And yet, 50% of wineries surveyed expect to increase DTC sales in 2026. I don’t think that’s unrealistic. The BMO report is right that DTC remains the channel where wineries can exert the most control. But control is only meaningful if you have visibility.
For most wineries, DTC data is fragmented. Tasting room POS lives in one system, wine club management in another, e-commerce in a third, and shipping compliance in a fourth. None of them talk to each other in real time, and none of them talk to inventory.
The result: club fulfillment teams don’t always know what’s actually available to commit, compliance management is manual and error-prone, and production decisions are made without an accurate picture of what DTC demand looks like across the full channel.
When tasting room, club, e-commerce, shipping compliance, and inventory share a connected platform, the winery has a complete picture of its most controllable channel — and can make decisions based on what’s actually happening, not what happened last quarter.
The Recovery is Coming. Will Your Winery Data Be Ready?
The 2026 BMO report found that 71% of wineries believe the market will recover within three years. I share that optimism. But the wineries that benefit most from a recovery will be the ones that used this period to get operationally disciplined — not the ones that waited it out.
The BMO report specifically notes that today’s leaner, data-driven operations “may be able to acquire additional assets to take advantage of a market recovery.” That opportunity doesn’t go to the wineries with the most wine in barrels. It goes to those who understand their costs, control their channels, and can make quick decisions when the window opens.
We built Crafted ERP because we kept seeing the same gap: winery operators with deep craft expertise and genuine passion for their product, running the business side on tools that couldn’t give them what they actually needed. Not just financial reporting in isolation, but connected, real-time winery data across production, inventory, sales, and compliance.
The market is smaller than it was. The competition for distributor shelf space, consumer loyalty, and wine club membership is more intense than it’s ever been. In that environment, measurement isn’t a back-office function. It’s a competitive capability.
The more you measure, the more you manage. And right now, that’s the whole game.
CRAFTED ERP — BUILT FOR WINERIES
Crafted ERP is a purpose-built winery ERP platform built in Oracle NetSuite, designed to give winery operators real-time visibility across vineyard management, production, inventory, financials, and operations. Explore the Winery Edition to see how Crafted supports the data discipline today’s market demands.
