If you pulled your wine club’s growth number for 2025 and felt underwhelmed, you weren’t imagining it. According to SVB’s 2026 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report, net wine club growth across the industry landed at just 2% last year, tied with 2024 for the lowest growth the report has shown since 2018, and a fraction of the 13% growth wineries saw as recently as 2021.
But here’s the number that didn’t make the headlines: the lifetime value of a wine club member hit the highest mark the report has shown since 2014, at $2,803. That’s not a typo, and it’s not a coincidence. Growth stalled and value climbed in the same year, and read side by side, they look like two symptoms of the same underlying shift. Understanding that shift is the difference between panicking over a flat membership count and actually reading what your club is telling you.
Growth didn’t collapse. It slid for years.
The instinct, when club growth flatlines, is to assume attrition spiked this year, that members are suddenly canceling in droves. That’s not really what happened. SVB’s own read: acquisition and attrition have moved closer together, new signups roughly offsetting cancellations, a shift they tie to the membership base skewing younger as long-tenured members age out. If acquisition is your focus, we’ve written before about how a tasting room visit can turn into a membership.
Look at the shape of the decline: 11% growth in 2018, a drop to just 4% in 2020, a sharp pandemic-era rebound to 13% in 2021, then a steady slide to 6% (2022), 5% (2023), and 2% in both 2024 and 2025. That’s not a cliff, it’s a multi-year slide. What the data does show clearly is that current performance tracks the size of your winery far more closely than it tracks the calendar. Size, not the year, is the more useful lens for reading your own number.
Size changes the math more than region does
If you want a useful benchmark from this year’s data, it’s this: net attrition tends to get worse as your club gets bigger.
Wineries producing 1 to 2,500 cases annually were the only size tier that posted positive net club growth in 2025, at +3%. Every tier above that was flat or negative: a modest -1% to -2% across most of the mid-size range (the 10,001–25,000 case tier landed exactly at flat, 0%), then a sharp drop to -6% for wineries producing 50,001–100,000 cases and again for the largest producers above 100,000 cases. SVB is careful to frame this as a general pattern, not a rule: larger clubs aren’t automatically doomed to attrition, and smaller clubs don’t automatically grow faster, but the trend across size tiers in 2025 is hard to miss.
That size effect is strong enough to explain a wrinkle in SVB’s own regional numbers. Across the dataset, the average winery acquired new members at a 26% rate against a 22% attrition rate, a spread that looks healthy on its own. But that figure is an average of each winery’s individual rate; it isn’t weighted by how many members each winery actually has. Actual regional totals tell a different story: Napa lost 86 net members in 2025, Sonoma lost 23, Santa Barbara lost 70, while Washington posted a modest net gain and Oregon essentially broke even. Regional totals are pulled around by whichever wineries carry the most members, and since larger wineries lose club members at a much steeper rate than small ones do, the “average winery” can look like it’s acquiring faster than it’s losing members while a region’s actual member count still shrinks, because the biggest clubs are the ones dragging the total down.
That’s a meaningful signal if you’re benchmarking yourself against “the industry” instead of against wineries your own size. A 100,000-case producer losing 6% of its club net each year isn’t necessarily doing anything wrong; that’s closer to the norm at that scale. A 3,000-case winery losing members at the same rate has a real retention problem.
Members are staying longer, and that’s carrying the value
Here’s the part of the story that explains the record LTV despite anemic growth: members who stick around are sticking around longer than they used to, in most places.
By 2025, average club tenure sat at some of the highest levels the report has shown: 41 months in Napa, 40 in Sonoma, 37 in the broader “Other CA” category, and 34 months in both Santa Barbara and Virginia. Most of those numbers reflect a real multi-year climb. A couple of exceptions worth noting: Napa and Washington both ticked down slightly from 2024, even though both remain well above their 2022–2023 levels, and Oregon stayed roughly flat over the same stretch.
Worth being precise about what’s actually driving that average up. Members who stick around get a year added to their tenure automatically, and far fewer brand-new members are entering the pool to pull the average back down, since club growth fell from 13% in 2021 to 2% by 2024 and 2025. Both of those push the average higher even while the longest-tenured members are the ones exiting. That’s not quite the same as retention getting better on its own; some of it is acquisition slowing down, not just existing members becoming more loyal. SVB frames it in similar terms elsewhere in the report: the club model isn’t broken, but it’s described as under pressure, with retention getting harder without ongoing engagement. So treat “members are staying longer” as real, but partial: some genuine stickiness, and less new-member dilution doing the rest of the work.
Wineries are also discounting less to get there
One more thread worth pulling: club discounts look like they’ve been shrinking, and the drop isn’t limited to entry-level bottles. From 2024 to 2025, the average club-member discount fell across every price tier SVB tracks, from 14% on wines under $20 down to 7% on wines priced at $100 and up, with declines at the high end that look just as steep as the ones at the low end. That’s consistent with wineries competing less on price cuts across the board, and more on the experience and relationship that come with membership.
That’s a separate finding from SVB’s broader survey of high- versus low-performing wineries generally, not specific to club members, but it points in the same direction: top performers are less likely to compete on price cuts and more likely to compete on the experience, access, and relationship that come with membership. If your club program still leans hard on “join and save 20%” as the pitch, this is a sign the rest of the industry is drifting away from that model, possibly because it’s no longer the thing that’s actually retaining people.
On shipping specifically, 39% of wineries offered discounted shipping for club members in 2025, down from a high the year before, another small data point suggesting the discount lever is being used more selectively than it used to be.
Retention is a systems problem before it’s a strategy problem
None of this is an argument for wineries to simply “focus on retention more.” Every winery already wants long-tenured, high-value club members. The real question is what actually produces tenure at the scale this data describes, and it isn’t a slogan.
Longer tenure is the accumulation of dozens of small, correct decisions made by whoever happens to be behind the tasting bar on a given afternoon: recognizing a returning guest, knowing they’re two visits from a club milestone, knowing their last shipment arrived late and was never followed up on, knowing which wine they raved about last time and pouring that first. Multiply that across every host, every shift, every guest, and it’s clear why “be more relationship-focused” is easy to say in a staff meeting and hard to actually execute once the floor gets busy. It’s the same pattern we wrote about in our tasting room relationships post: relationships, not renovations, drive the outcome.
In practice, most of the wineries producing these tenure numbers are still doing it the hard way: leaning on a few veteran hosts with a great memory, or a notebook behind the bar, because the POS system itself has no idea what happened the last time a guest walked in. That works until the right person isn’t on shift, has a bad day, or moves on. It’s not a system. It’s a dependency, and it caps how far tenure can climb before it becomes fragile. That’s the gap a unified guest profile is actually built to close: purchase history, visit history, and club status, synced in real time across every screen your team touches, so it doesn’t matter who happens to be pouring. Here’s what that looks like on the floor: a guest checks in with the digital ID already saved to their phone’s wallet. By the time they reach the bar, the host has a quick read on who they are, what they’ve bought before, and how close they are to a club milestone. No digging. No guessing. No depending on which host happens to remember them.
That’s the difference between one exceptional host and a consistently good experience, no matter who’s on the floor. Every host gets the same information on every shift. That consistency is what turns this year’s tenure and LTV gains into next year’s trend, instead of a number that depended on the right person being on shift that day.
That’s the gap between wanting to be a retention-first winery and being one. Spending less energy chasing new signups and more on the guests you already have only pays off if your team has the information to act on it in the moment, guest by guest, not after the fact in a monthly report.
What this means for how you run your club
Pulling it together, three things are true at once in 2026, and they’re not in tension the way they first appear:
- Club growth, industrywide, has flatlined at roughly 2%, and that’s the new normal, not a crisis. Double-digit club growth hasn’t been the norm for years now, and treating 2021’s 13% spike as the baseline you should be measuring yourself against will only make today’s numbers look worse than they are.
- The size of your club matters less than what you’re doing with retention. If you’re a small producer, you’re currently in the one segment still growing net membership. Protect that. If you’re mid-size or larger, expect gravity to pull your net growth negative, and build your targets accordingly.
- Tenure, not acquisition, is where the value is being created right now, and tenure is an operations problem as much as a mindset one. A club member you keep an extra year is worth more than the discount it’d take to sign up a new one. But shifting weight toward retention only works if your whole team, not just your best host, has real-time, unified visibility into who each guest is and where they stand with you.
The wine club isn’t broken. It’s not the growth engine it was in 2021 anymore, and pretending it still is will make this year’s flat number look like a failure instead of what it actually is: a slower-growing, longer-tenured, higher-value asset that’s changed jobs without anyone sending out a memo. Recognizing that shift is the easy part. Building the systems that let your whole team act on it, guest by guest, visit by visit, is the harder, and more valuable, one.
If your team is already leaning toward retention but doing it the hard way, hoping the right host is on shift, digging for context after a guest is already at the bar, that’s exactly the gap Vintiga was built to close. Our unified guest profile puts a visitor’s history, preferences, and club status in front of every host in real time, from check-in to pour, so a consistent experience doesn’t depend on who happens to be working that day. Book a demo to see what it looks like for your tasting room.
Source: SVB’s 2026 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report (June 2026), based on survey responses from 450 wine producers, collected March 3–April 3, 2026.