(Wine Searcher) - Direct to consumer sales up to $3 billion, spelling big change for the US wine industry model.

The data is impressive.

In 2018, wineries shipped more than 6 million cases of wine, a nine percent increase over the previous year, according to Larry Cormier's presentation at the annual Direct to Consumer Wine Symposium held in Concord, California. Cormier is the general manager of the Colorado-based ShipCompliant/Sovos company, which gathers this data for presentation to the wine community each year.

The Direct to Consumer Wine Shipping Report is an annual collaboration between Sovos and Wine Vines Analytics, which uses data from both and examines wine shipments from wineries to consumers in the US. It uses an algorithm to track 10,000 wineries by region, annual production, destination of shipments, varietal and price point. Some 43 percent of the wineries are below the 1000-case production mark and only 1 percent are producing more than 500,000 cases annually