A while ago I pulled stats from CellarTracker to quench my thirst for Garagiste versus trad retailers’ business. More recently while discussing the pandemic-influenced buying habits of our group over a virtual tasting where some folks chose to meet inside a virtual reality (Animal Crossing), we pondered this brave new world. As one wise man said, one believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
We all have heard that small(er) wineries are suffering because tasting room and restaurant / wholesale business dropped off. This propelled some segment of the buying public into action; others were already experienced competitors on fridge-living room-couch circuit. It made me curious about the buying habits of our friends and neighbors during the quarantine period so I took another look at CellarTracker. Thanks again to Eric for making the stats available to all CT subscribers.
To isolate buying during quarantine, I chose April 1-30 2020 as the period based on stay-at-home orders in US. Most US states issued these orders in late March to early April. If a bottle was recorded in CT as having been purchased during April 1-30, I counted it in my stats. I then compared the results from April 2020 to those from April in prior years.
For those not familiar with CT, “Remaining” refers to bottles purchased but not consumed.
- Overall trend
April 2020: Bottles Purchased: 743,295 / Consumed: 92,982 (13%) / Remaining: 650,313
April 2019: Bottles Purchased: 599,287 / Consumed: 194,685 (33%) / Remaining: 404,602
April 2018: Bottles Purchased: 556,936 / Consumed: 232,262 (42%) / Remaining: 322,674
April 2017: Bottles Purchased: 573,020 / Consumed: 257,083 (45%) / Remaining: 315,937
In April of 2017-2019, the rate of consumption holds steady, quite so if factoring out some % of new CT subscribers who signed up in later years. In April 2020 the number of purchased bottles jumped by 25% versus 2019, a massive increase.
The drop in consumption of just-purchased bottles is interesting. One might come up with a simple reason such as ‘CT users are buying wines to age’ but why wouldn’t the same rationale work in prior years. Perhaps an average CT user bought a lot more this April versus prior years and couldn’t drink as much. Another possibility is that they’ve been overwhelmed by drinking more (versus prior years) of wine they already own, thus putting more of the newly purchased stuff aside.
- Sources of purchased wine
April 2020, Top 10:
Unknown 32.7% Bottles purchased (243,081) / Remaining (219,418)
Winery 11% Bottles purchased (82,659) / Remaining (75,373)
Wine Club 1.1% Bottles purchased (8,228) / Remaining (7,603)
Costco 1.1% Bottles purchased (7,890) / Remaining (5,981)
Last Bottle 0.9% Bottles purchased (6,602) / Remaining (5,775)
Garagiste 0.8% Bottles purchased (5,790) / Remaining (5,514)
WTSO 0.7% Bottles purchased (5,446) / Remaining (4,531)
Wine.com 0.7% Bottles purchased (5,027) / Remaining (4,076)
JJ Buckley 0.6% Bottles purchased (4,813) / Remaining (4,663)
Total Wine 0.6% Bottles purchased (4,612) / Remaining (3,373)
April 2019, Top 10:
Unknown 27.3% Bottles purchased (163,433) / Remaining (113,902)
Winery 11.4% Bottles purchased (68,209) / Remaining (48,603)
Wine Club 1.2% Bottles purchased (7,276) / Remaining (4,860)
Garagiste 1.1% Bottles purchased (6,667) / Remaining (4,872)
Costco 1.1% Bottles purchased (6,364) / Remaining (2,562)
Total Wine 0.8% Bottles purchased (4,666) / Remaining (2,102)
Last Bottle 0.7% Bottles purchased (4,417) / Remaining (2,517)
JJ Buckley 0.6% Bottles purchased (3,738) / Remaining (3,338)
Restaurant 0.6% Bottles purchased (3,631) / Remaining (63)
WTSO 0.6% Bottles purchased (3,401) / Remaining (1,796)
I manually created the “Winery” category by combining “Vineyard”, “Winery”, “Direct”, “Winery Direct” and “Direct from Winery”. Non-US retail entities such as SAQ and Systembolaget were removed. “Wine Club” could mean “wine club run by the winery” (and therefore should be counted under “Winery” as direct-to-consumer) or it could mean an independent, non-winery club that aggregates product from many producers. Therefore “Wine Club” is left alone as its own entry.
With Unknown at 30%, it’s risky to draw meaningful conclusions from this data but again, the trend is clear. Plenty of product is being bought directly from the wineries but there’s no year-over-year increase…unless it’s hiding in that 30%, that is. (IMO, I don’t think so. I think Unknown breaks down proportionally the same way as tagged transactions if CT users were to categorize all of their purchases). Translation: buying habits did not change and there was no magical stampede to buy direct from wineries.
The top 10 club is virtually unchanged from 2019 to 2020. The minor change in percentages for Garagiste, Costco, WTSO and others is, well, minor. If you group the top 10 results into “Online-Only Retail” (Garagiste, Last Bottle, WTSO, JJ Buckley, wine.com), “Mostly On-Premises Retail” (Costco and Total), “Direct from Winery”, “Restaurant” and “Wine Club”, then Online-Only is tied for 2nd place after Direct from Winery.
A major top 10 club beneficiary of stay-at-home orders appears to be wine.com. In April 2019, they were barely in top 20 with 0.4% purchased bottles (2,392) and in April 2020 they’ve almost doubled that at 0.7% with 5,027 bottles. The domain name must be worth many, many millions as that alone brings them a ton of visitors. Having bought from wine.com a few times, on average they savagely mark up more expensive product and then bring it back down some by releasing discount codes/coupons that appear to bear significant savings, an age-old strategy that works well for them. Look ma, a bargain! On a year-to-year basis, they’re out-gamifying Rimmerman, for Pete’s sake! Shame on you Jon for losing to such bombastic simpletons.