Most winery visitors buy bottles after tasting

More than 7 out of 10 people who visit a winery leave with wine, according to new data from Wine Suite, a platform that tracks direct sales in the wine business and presented its findings this week at Vinitaly Tourism in Verona. The analysis shows that in 2025, 77.4% of visitors bought bottles at the winery’s own shop, when one was available, or paid to have the wine shipped to them after the visit.

The figures point to a sector that is becoming more important for Italian wine producers as tourism and direct sales continue to grow. At Vinitaly 2026, organizers said Italian wine tourism now draws about 15 million visitors a year, generates roughly 3 billion euros in spending and has seen direct sales rise by 21.4%. Wine Suite’s data help explain why: the winery visit itself is increasingly tied to the purchase.

In 2025, the average in-person purchase was 7.3 bottles, down from 8.5 in 2024. The average ticket was 147 euros, well above the 117.5 euros recorded in 2022 after the pandemic, but below the 178.8 euros seen in 2024. Even with that decline, the average price per bottle remained close to 20 euros.

Most buyers still purchased modest quantities. In 45.4% of cases, visitors bought between one and three bottles. Another 25.9% bought four to six bottles, while 17.5% bought seven to 12 bottles. Larger purchases were less common: 7.4% of transactions reached as many as 24 bottles.

Wine Suite also found that online sales are becoming more important for wineries’ direct-to-consumer business. In 2025, the average e-commerce order rose to 197.9 euros, up 9.5% from 2024. But the number of bottles per online order fell sharply to 8.9, down 19% from the previous year, reinforcing a broader pattern of fewer bottles but higher-value purchases.

The gap between Italian and foreign buyers remained wide. Foreign customers bought an average of 11.2 bottles per order and spent 317 euros on average, compared with 159.9 euros for Italian buyers.

The timing of purchases is also changing. Wine sales are spreading more evenly across the second half of the year, starting in June, with less concentration in the final quarter than before. The share of orders placed in the last three months of the year fell from 50.7% in 2023 to 31.7% in 2025, a shift that wineries say can improve cash flow and liquidity by bringing revenue forward rather than relying so heavily on holiday-season demand.