The tasting room used to be the heart of the winery business model. Walk-ins became club members. Club members became brand ambassadors. Revenue flowed predictably, and the formula worked. That’s changing. Visitation to wine regions is softening and tasting room traffic that wineries once counted...

Five years ago, running a winery on Shopify meant duct-taping a lot of things together. Great for e-commerce. Okay for DTC. Difficult for wine clubs. Not really designed for tasting rooms. That's changed. The combination of Shopify's platform investments and a handful of wine-specific apps has...

A few years ago at the DTC Wine Symposium, a panelist joked about the modern winery website formula: the guy, the dog, the truck, and the vineyard. Beautiful backdrop, strong lifestyle photography, a thoughtful founder story. Polished, absolutely. Strategically distinct, rarely. The critique wasn’t...

WineDirect to Commerce7: 19% Growth in Club Customization, 50% Less Support, and the End of "Batch Day" TL;DR: Faced with manual bottlenecks on WineDirect, Hill Family Estate migrated to Commerce7 to empower their members. The results were immediate: a 19% increase in customized club shipments and...

The Unified Wine & Grape Symposium is where the North American wine industry comes together to shape what’s next. As a manufacturer of high-end stainless steel tanks, La Garde Inox showcased its latest innovations in Sacramento. Our presence at major trade shows reflects a simple idea: being close...

If you run a tasting room, you know this situation well. A guest has a great visit. They taste through the wines, fall in love with them, and decide to join the club. They set their shipments to pickup because naturally they are already planning their next trip back to the winery. But sometimes...

Migrating to a new DTC platform can feel like a heavy lift. Between data transfers, integrations, and retraining staff, it is easy to delay the move until it becomes unavoidable. But waiting is not the only risk. Choosing the wrong platform can be just as costly. When Raj Patel of PATEL Napa Valley...

The wine industry is facing unprecedented challenges. With many wineries and related businesses feeling the pressure from rising costs and declining sales, it might seem like the only option is to cut back or even shutter operations. But as history shows, downturns are often the perfect time to...

Your Customers Check Texts Faster Than Emails, So Why Are You Still Only Relying on Inboxes? The typical American checks their phone 96 times a day, that's once every 10 minutes. While your carefully crafted email campaign sits unopened among dozens of others, text messages get read within minutes....

Are Your Wine Club Members Ghosting You? Here's Why Your wine club members are breaking up with you, but they're not telling you why. They're just... disappearing. The numbers are stark: Silicon Valley Bank's latest research (which we are going to reference a lot in this blog) shows wine clubs are...