Key Takeaways A winery is legally two businesses at once: an agricultural employer and a licensed wine producer, and most HR platforms are only built to handle one. Job title doesn’t determine treatment. Duties do. The same employee can move between agricultural and non-agricultural work within a single week. Crush season exposes problems built months earlier, from rushed seasonal hiring to unverified worker classifications. A structured self-audit beats reconstructing records during a DOL, TTB, or state inquiry. Würk’s tools help wineries stay prepared year-round. A winery’s obligations touch more regulatory categories than almost any other small business: agricultural labor law, guest-facing wage rules, wine-production rules, multi-state payroll withholding, and immigration regulations, often within a single organizational chart. This guide walks through a practical internal-review framework for wineries and vineyards with 10 to 500 employees. It’s operational guidance, not advic

Hosted by vinSUITE, the free two-day event brings specialists from across the wine industry together to answer one question: what’s working for wine clubs right now. vinSUITE, the software platform built for winery direct-to-consumer and wine club operations, today announced its annual Wine Club Symposium, a free two-day virtual event taking place September 15 and 16. The event, which drew 550 registrants in 2025, brings the direct-to-consumer community together to learn from one another and strengthen the wine club. The Symposium exists because the wine club matters. It is the most dependable recurring revenue a winery has, and it is under real pressure. Tasting rooms, still the main way wineries sign up new members, are seeing softer traffic, which makes acquisition harder. Retention is getting tougher too, as long-time members age and shifts in drinking habits, including the effect of newer medications, change how much they buy. vinSUITE hosts the Symposium each year to help wineri

Your Tasting Room Is Your #1 Club Acquisition Channel. Here's What Top Wineries Do Differently. A guest walks into your tasting room. They're already engaged. They're already drinking your wine. They're already emotionally invested in the experience. And then they leave without joining your club. If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. SVB's Direct-to-Consumer Wine Survey benchmarks conversion rates at 8 to 10% for top-performing tasting rooms, but the average is significantly lower. That means most wineries are leaving signups on the table at the exact moment guests are most ready to say yes. With tasting room visitation down roughly 8% year over year and wine clubs now accounting for 39% of total DTC sales, the pressure to convert visitors into members has never been higher. The good news is that the wineries growing their clubs aren't doing anything mysterious. They're executing three things consistently. Here's what to focus on. 1. Make the ask easy in the moment T

Text messaging has evolved far beyond promotional blasts and last-minute event reminders. Today's most successful wineries are using SMS throughout the customer journey—from recovering wine club declines and improving shipping success rates to collecting customer feedback and driving allocation sales. The result is a more personalized customer experience, stronger retention, and measurable revenue growth. During a recent discussion with RedChirp and our mutual client, Black Ankle Vineyards, we explored how wineries are using SMS to create more meaningful customer interactions at every stage of the DTC journey. Black Ankle's Emma Pope shared several real-world examples of campaigns that have driven engagement, streamlined communication, and generated measurable results—offering a valuable look at how modern wineries are putting text messaging to work. While every winery's audience and goals are different, several clear themes emerged. The most successful programs aren't simply sending m

The 2026 SVB Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report delivers a message that every winery owner and operator should pay attention to. The headline isn't that visitation is down. Most wineries already know that. The headline isn't that wine club growth has slowed. Most wineries are experiencing that reality as well. The real story is that while the median winery reported no growth, the top-performing quartile of wineries increased revenue by 22%, while the bottom quartile declined by 13%. In other words, wineries are operating in the same market conditions but achieving dramatically different results. So what separates the winners from the rest? The Industry Challenges Remain The report confirms several trends that continue to pressure winery profitability. Direct-to-consumer sales remain the foundation of the premium wine business, accounting for approximately 72% of revenue. Yet the channels driving those sales are under strain. Tasting room visitation continues to decline, reducing opportunit

If you came to the 2026 Wine Sales Symposium hoping for an economist to deliver good news about wine consumption, Chris Bitter wasn't your guy. Bitter, a wine economist with Terrain - the economic and market research arm of American AgCredit - opened his session with a prediction attendees didn't want to hear: wine consumption is going to continue declining for the foreseeable future. But he also delivered a more hopeful message. The premium and luxury segments are holding up considerably better than the broader market, and wineries willing to adapt to a changing consumer still have real opportunities to win. A Smaller Share of a Smaller Pie Bitter walked attendees through the two challenges defining the current moment. First, fewer Americans are drinking, and those who do drink are drinking less. Second, wine is losing share to other categories within alcohol itself. The result, in his words, is "a smaller share of a smaller pie." The decline isn't temporary. After decades of growth,

The wine industry isn’t standing still—and neither were the conversations at this year’s Wine Sales Symposium The mood surrounding the wine industry has shifted noticeably over the past year. Headlines still focus on contraction, slowing sales, declining consumption, and pressure across direct-to-consumer and wholesale channels. But underneath those realities, another story is emerging: wineries are adapting. That theme carried through nearly every session at Wine Industry Network’s 2026 Wine Sales Symposium, where winery owners, marketers, strategists, hospitality leaders, and technology providers gathered to discuss what’s actually changing in wine sales—and where opportunity still exists. The conversations were grounded in realism but notably absent of panic. Speakers focused on the operational, marketing, and consumer shifts wineries are making in response to a rapidly evolving market. And perhaps most importantly, many of the sessions pointed toward the same conclusion: growth ha

A lot of wineries still think AI is only useful for writing social captions or speeding up content creation. But in reality, AI is quickly becoming one of the most valuable tools wineries can use to improve wine club retention, personalization, customer engagement, and operational efficiency. As customer acquisition becomes more expensive and consumer expectations continue to evolve, wineries are under increasing pressure to build stronger relationships with existing customers, not just acquire new ones. That’s where AI is starting to make a real impact. In many cases, wineries can start experimenting with AI using tools they already use every day, including CRM exports, email marketing data, POS reporting, ChatGPT, or AI-powered analytics platforms. Today, wineries are using AI-powered tools and smarter segmentation strategies to: ✅ Spot at-risk members before they cancel ✅ Personalize club shipments, events, and perks ✅ Identify high-value customers who aren’t club members — yet ✅ Au

The Shift in Drinking Habits Is Here Something structural has changed in how Americans relate to alcohol, and if you've been watching your DTC numbers, you've probably felt it before you could name it. Gallup's 2023 consumption survey found that the share of U.S. adults who drink has dropped to 62%, the lowest level since 1948. The IWSR has documented consecutive years of volume decline in still wine in the U.S. market. The casual, habitual wine buyer who grabs a familiar label on autopilot and treats wine as a grocery category is drinking less or shifting away entirely. Volume-driven marketing built around that consumer is chasing a contracting audience. That sounds threatening. It isn't, if you're willing to look at who is still buying. The consumer who remains is choosing quality over quantity, spending more per bottle precisely because they're buying fewer of them, and actively looking for brands worth their loyalty. The wineries that adapt their marketing to speak this language h

Why Wineries Are Leaning Into Technology for Growth Wine Has Finally Caught Up to Ecommerce Wine has always operated differently from the rest of ecommerce. Most industries follow similar patterns. They invest in digital acquisition, optimize conversion, and build systems that scale. Wineries never really did. Between compliance, wine clubs, tasting rooms, and long-standing industry habits, wineries built their businesses around in-person relationships, not online performance. Because of that, wine has historically been underserved by modern ecommerce tools. Platforms weren’t designed for how wineries actually operate, so wineries adapted by working around those limitations instead of solving them. That’s starting to change. Shopify has quickly become a leading ecommerce platform for wineries looking to modernize how they sell wine online. Checkout is faster thanks to Shop Pay Building and updating curated customer experiences is easier The platform integrates with tools that handle