The United States (US) has too many wineries, according to an annual report issued Tuesday.
They're all competing for increasingly limited spots in retail shops and hoping direct sales to consumers (DTC) will save them, but consumers are now buying fewer wines DTC than they have since that market took off 10 years ago.
BMO's annual Wine Market Report repeats many of the same themes of other such reports – naturally, because the facts on the ground are the same. There's a bit of good news in the report's headline: Americans spent 3 percent more on wine in 2025 than the year before. Volume sales were down; Americans spent slightly more per bottle. Still, it is good news that, despite economic pressures, Americans still have the same space for wine in their budget.
But the mouths crying out for a piece of that pie are getting increasingly desperate. And no wonder, as the pie isn't getting bigger despite the crowd at the table.
The report from the US subsidiary of the Bank of Montreal says the total number of wineries in the US declined 4 percent in 2024 and another 3 percent in 2025. The US now has 11,107 wineries, 4646 of which are in California. That's too many, as this sentence from the report shows: "In 2012, total US wine market volume was more than 367 million cases and there were 7435 wineries. Current market volume is 1 percent smaller than in 2012, while the number of wineries is nearly 50 percent larger."
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