"'From our perspective, there's no problem,' noted Richard Sands, chairman and CEO of Constellation Brands, the second largest wine producer in the United States and a very diversified supplier of beer and spirits. 'Like other large wine and spirits companies, we've been monitoring depletions and sales to retailers for years.'
Like others in the industry, Sands uses the term depletions to refer to sales from distributors to retail accounts; wine companies tend to call their own sales shipments."
http://www.winebusiness.com/wbm/?go=getArticle&dataId=16090

"BPM: Can you describe the various kinds of information that you feed into the Cognos system and where they come from?
Walsh: It's pretty much all of the operational volumes: sales, open orders, and what we call “depletions” in the wine and spirits industry. We sell to a distributor and that's our sale, and when the distributor sells to the retailer, or nightclub, or liquor store, that's a depletion for us. That's how we measure the health of our business — by what goes from the distributor to the retailer."
http://bpmmag.net/mag/toast_pervasive_bpm/