For most wineries, marketing still follows a familiar path: email campaigns, wine clubs, tasting room experiences, and social media. These channels continue to drive direct-to-consumer sales, but they are also becoming increasingly saturated. Reaching new customers often requires more content, more...

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 question I’ve been thinking about lately: Do your tasting room systems actually work together, or do they just coexist? For many small WA wineries, the setup feels fine on the surface. You launch ecommerce. You add a POS. You manage your clubs. You run reports. Sure everything functions. But a...

Tasting rooms and clubs expose the gaps Most platforms handle the basics well. The real differences show up when things get busy — and clubs get big. What wineries often run into: POS built for retail, not hospitality Club workflows that don’t scale cleanly Online orders and in-person activity...

The 2026 State of the U.S. Wine Industry Report, published by Silicon Valley Bank and authored by Rob McMillan, provides a comprehensive, data-driven assessment of current conditions in the U.S. wine market. Built on more than 25 years of industry research, the report combines results from SVB’s...

Sparkling wine is one of the most expressive and technically demanding wine styles. Its character begins with the grape variety, the vineyard, and the production method, but the final sensory signature depends heavily on yeast. Yeast acts as the invisible winemaker, shaping aroma, flavor, texture,...

Two years ago, I wrote an article on AI in the vineyard for WBM. Feel free to read that article here…if you want. Otherwise, my basic argument was that although AI will eventually play a role in how we farm grapes, it’s a long way off compared to other industries and even other crops. We who grow...

When a Washington winery transitions to Shopify POS, the visible experience in the tasting room doesn’t change dramatically. Guests are still welcomed. Wine is still poured. Bottles are still sold. What changes is operational structure. For many wineries in WA, POS, ecommerce, wine club management,...

Everywhere you look right now—Hallmark Channel, Netflix, social media—it’s Christmas in July. And while most people are watching cozy movies and pretending it’s snowing outside, here’s a better question for wineries: Are you ready for your holiday season? October, November, and December (OND) are...