In California, when you see those shiny tanker trucks from Cherokee Trucking going in both directions, it does make you think about the amount wine hauled from point A to point B and from point C to both points A and B. You get the idea. Wine is mostly a bunch of hooey from the marketing department. There are no little red-nosed winemakers. Those days are gone.
Cheaper (and, smaller carbon foot print!) to ship a tanker full of a wine to local bottlers for local distribution than to ship all that glass in empty and out full of wine from the vintner’s location.
Of course the small producers do it their own way. I imagine it’s like the man said, to become a millionaire in the wine business start with 2 million.