(Wines&Vines) - For their annual survey about trends in tasting rooms, Silicon Valley Bank and Wine Business Monthly query bank customers and other wineries about their practices. The results always seem to turn up some surprises, and the questions are tweaked each year to reflect current trends.

This year, 839 wineries provided valid results—a significant sample of the roughly 8,000 wineries in the United States and Canada.

Those responding generate an average of 60% of total revenue from direct-t0-consumer (DtC) sales, with the percentage dropping from 74% for wineries producing fewer than 2,500 cases to 15% for those making more than 250,000 cases.

Overall, an average of 47% of DtC revenues were derived from tasting room sales, 33% from wine club members and allocation lists, 8% by web, mail and phone sales, 5% from events and 5% from other direct channels.

“Wineries don’t make money on events,” said Rob McMillan, executive vice president and founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s Wine Division in a webcast about the report. “They support other sales.”

 “Wine clubs let us connect with our guests,” said Carol C. Reber, chief marketing officer for Duckhorn Wine Co. “They’re affordable luxuries, like the country clubs of yesterday.”

 U.S. wineries received an average of 1,360 visitors per month from public and appointments, with Anderson Valley seeing the fewest at 421 per month and New York wineries reporting the highest number of visitors at 2,776.

Napa and Sonoma wineries averaged around 1,480 visitors per month. If you counted only tastings open to the public, Napa jumped to 2,763 visitors per month.