(Wines&Vines) - Ten years after the Supreme Court pried open a legal passage for direct-to-consumer wine shipments, the value of this sales channel nudged the $2 billion mark in 2015. Wineries collected $1,966,668,198 for 4,286,743 cases of domestic wine.

The total was 8.1% higher in value than in 2014, and 8.5% higher in volume, as 427,616 more cases were sold. The annual growth rate was lower than 2014’s 15% but higher than 2013’s 7%.

DtC shipments have grown much faster in recent years than conventional off-premise sales in stores, as wineries rushed to take advantage of the higher margins from direct sales, and in some cases adopted the direct route as their only channel due to distributor consolidation.

A new report available to the public today at shipcompliant.com details the whole DtC market in a 28-page document with dozens of graphics and expert analysis. The 2016 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Shipping Report examines the growth and characteristics of this dynamic sales channel from every angle, including by month, by winery size, by varietal and type, by price category, by winery region and by destination state.

Wines & Vines partnered with ShipCompliant to create the model that calculates the channel’s growth. Since 2010, value of the direct-to-consumer shipping industry has increased 66%, and 2015 proved to be another growth year for the channel.

Growth rates for volume and value in 2015 were similar, and the slight difference of these rates can be attributed to a 0.4% difference from 2014’s average price per bottle of wine shipped. The average price decreased from $38.40 in 2014 to $38.23 in 2015.

“What is striking, though,” said one of the report’s authors, Jeff Carroll, vice president of strategy and compliance for ShipCompliant, “is that this progress outpaces that of the retail wine marketplace.”

The DtC’s 8.5% volume growth exceeds the 2.2% growth the retail wine marketplace experienced in 2015, according to Nielsen. Additionally, the 8.1% growth of the DtC industry in value outpaced what Nielsen found was a 6% increase in value of the wine retail marketplace.