Perhaps you, like me, were isolated in your home during the start of the covid virus. You couldn’t even go out to buy a bottle of wine without incurring the wrath of a spouse who insisted on you scrubbing down the bottle and disrobing in the garage. We can laugh at it now, but we were terrified of the unknown.

Retail stores remained open because when it comes to wine and liquor sales, there is nothing like fear to drive profits. When I was in Maryland, the highest day of sales didn’t come on New Year’s Eve — it came on the eve of a snow blizzard.

People stuck indoors and surfing the net also bought cases of wine online. If they didn’t order wines from their favorite West Coast producers, they found importers and clubs to get wine delivered to their doorstep. But as covid has weaved its way through our neighborhoods and people have relaxed their precautions, they are ordering less wine online. According to Wines Vines Analytics/Sovos Ship Complaint, direct-to-consumer sales (those which bypass the distributor and retailer) dropped nearly 13 percent in June when compared to the previous June. Wine sales normally slow in the summer because producers are reluctant to ship wine in warm temperatures, but nonetheless the drop signals a change in consumer habits.

The report also mirrored other research that shows consumers are paying more for a bottle of wine. The average bottle price is now $32.84.