A winery app that runs tastings, the club and will call.
A winery app has three jobs a restaurant app does not: seat a tasting, run a wine club that bills and ships on a schedule, and hand a case to a member who chose to collect it. It is the winery-shaped corner of restaurant and hospitality apps: the reservation is a tasting, the regular is a club member, and the takeaway order is a case waiting at will call.
This page is about what those three jobs actually require: the fields a tasting booking needs, how a club run bills and splits into shipping and pickup, and the state rules that decide whether a bottle can go in a box at all. Breweries get the same shape with different nouns, and a section of their own below.
See what a winery app has to trackThe short version
Three jobs, one member record underneath all of them.
A winery app books tastings against time slots and seat counts, runs the wine club on a fixed calendar (charge the card on file, then ship or hold for pickup), and manages will call as a hold with a window and an expiry. All three hang off the same customer record: age confirmed, card on file, club tier, fulfillment preference, and the state the wine is going to, because that state decides whether the winery may ship at all. Get the record right and the rest is scheduling.
The fields
What a winery app has to track.
Every winery adds its own quirks, but the base record behind a tasting booking, a club membership and a will-call hold looks the same from Napa to the Finger Lakes. Use the three cards as a checklist against whatever you run today.
Tasting bookings
A reservation, but the unit is a seat in a time slot, not a table for the evening.
- Date, start time and duration, with a seat count per slot
- Party size, and a cap above which the booking becomes a group request
- Experience type: flight, seated tasting, tour and tasting, private
- Per-person fee, and whether a purchase or a membership waives it
- Card hold or deposit, with the cancellation and no-show rule
- Host or table assignment, notes and accessibility needs
- Member status, so a complimentary tasting applies without a debate at the counter
Wine club
A subscription where the product and the price change every run, and the member chooses a porch or the tasting room.
- Tier: bottles per shipment, chosen by the winery or by the member
- Frequency, the billing calendar and the member discount
- Card on file and the billing date the member agreed to
- Fulfillment preference, ship or pick up, changeable until a cut-off
- Shipping address, and the state it sits in
- Age confirmation and the acknowledgement that an adult will sign
- Minimum commitment, cancellation notice, and skip or swap rules
Pickup and shipping
Will call is a hold with an expiry; shipping is a compliance check with a box attached.
- Pickup window open and close dates, with reminders inside it
- Who may collect: the member or a named second person, ID at the counter
- What happens when the hold expires: ship at the member's cost, or forfeit
- A licensed-states list per shipping license
- Adult-signature labeling, and any per-resident monthly cap
- A reporting calendar per state, monthly in some, annual in others
The slot-and-capacity model in the first card is the same one a best campground app runs, with a site and a night instead of a table and an hour. And a winery that pours at a farmers market or a festival has, for that weekend, a food truck app problem: a location that moves and a preorder window that closes. The member record does not change in either case; only the slot does.
The club run
How a wine club actually works.
A wine club is a subscription with three twists: the product changes every run, the price is set per run, and the member chooses between a box on the porch and a case at the tasting room. Ponte Winery's published club terms are a clear example of the shape: six shipments a year, in February, April, June, August, October and December, three bottles each (December adds a magnum), 20% off, the card charged on the first of the shipment month for the retail value less the discount plus tax and any shipping. Members may pick up at the winery or have it shipped, shipping requires a recipient aged 21 or over with age verification, and cancellation is penalty-free only after two shipments; cancel earlier and the winery may charge back the discounts received. Read Ponte's wine club terms.
Every one of those sentences is a rule the app enforces with a date or a flag. Laid out in order, a club run looks like this:
- 1
Lock the release
Which wines go in the box, their retail value, and the member price after the discount. Nothing downstream works until this is fixed.
- 2
Run the pre-billing check
Expired cards, changed addresses, and any ship-to address in a state the winery is not licensed for. These get fixed before billing day, not discovered after it.
- 3
Bill on the published date
Charge every card on file for the release price plus tax and, for shipments, shipping. Record the charge against the member, retry declines on a schedule, and message the member when a retry fails.
- 4
Split the run
Shipments get a state check, an adult-signature label and a tracking number. Pickups get a hold with a window and a shelf location at the tasting room.
- 5
Run the pickup window
Reminders at the open, mid-way and near the close. ID at the counter. A named second person can collect if the member set one up in advance.
- 6
Close the run
Unclaimed holds follow your terms, shipped at the member's cost or marked never claimed, and the shipment reports each state expects are filed on that state's cadence.
Try it
Plan a club run
Pick a tier and a cadence. The planner spaces the runs across the year (ending in December, where most clubs put the holiday release) and lists what the app has to do on each billing date.
Bottles per run
Runs per year
Default fulfillment
Pickup hold
Your club year
12 bottles a member, across 4 billing runs
On each billing date the app has to
- Charge the card on file for the release price plus tax
- Open a 90-day pickup hold and put the case on the will-call shelf
- Send reminders inside the window, then apply your unclaimed rule when it closes
- Check ID at the counter, or the named second person, before handing it over
Member perks beyond the discount, a complimentary tasting on each visit, points on tasting-room spend, a birthday bottle, are a loyalty problem rather than a club problem. How points, punches and redemptions get modeled is its own subject, covered under loyalty card apps.
Shipping
Can a winery ship wine to every state?
No, and the rules are written state by state, which is why the ship-to state is a first-class field in a winery app and not a line inside an address. Both regulators below assume the winery already holds its federal TTB permit; everything after that differs. Two permit pages, read side by side, show how far apart the rules sit:
| Rule | Washington (LCB) | South Carolina (DOR) |
|---|---|---|
| Who can get the permit | Any US winery licensed as a winery in its home state and holding a federal TTB license | A winery holding a TTB Wine Producer or Blender's Permit |
| Permit fee | $150, raised to that amount on July 27, 2025 | $600, due every two years with renewal |
| Volume cap per consumer | None: no limit on the amount shipped to a Washington consumer | 24 bottles per resident per month |
| Reporting | Monthly shipment report, even with no sales, plus monthly wine liter tax and state sales tax | Annual Out-of-State Wine Shipper Report |
| Package rule | Container labeling must say it cannot be delivered to anyone under 21 or who appears intoxicated | Not addressed on the permit page |
| Beer to consumers | Cannot be shipped to consumers | Not covered by this permit |
From the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board's direct shipping page and the South Carolina Department of Revenue's wine shipper permit page, both read in September 2026. Fees and caps change; check the regulator before relying on either number.
What that means for the app
- A licensed-states list, one per shipping license, that the address form checks at signup rather than on billing day
- A per-resident counter for any state that caps volume, so the 25th bottle in a month is refused before a label prints
- A flag that forces adult-signature labeling on every shipment
- A reporting calendar per state: monthly where a regulator wants it monthly, annual where it wants it annually
What the app should refuse
- A club signup with a shipping address in a state you hold no permit for (offer pickup instead)
- A run that bills a member whose ship-to state changed since the last pre-billing check
- A shipment label for beer where the state does not allow beer to consumers at all
- A pickup handed over without the ID check your terms promise
Picking an approach
Winery software, off the shelf or your own.
None of the fields above need a particular tool, but the common setups each leave at least one of the three jobs on paper.
| Approach | Tasting bookings | Club runs | Pickup windows | Ship-state rules | Fits | Who maintains it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Calendar, spreadsheet and the tasting-room POS | by phone, into a calendar | manual card runs | a shelf and a memory | No | until the club outgrows it | you, by hand |
| Reservation platform only | Yes | No | No | No | the booking half | the vendor |
| Winery DTC platform | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | the standard club model | the vendor |
| Custom-built winery app | Yes | Yes | Yes | whatever your licenses say | your process, odd parts included | you |
Winery DTC platforms price by direct-to-consumer revenue rather than by seat. Commerce7, which lists point of sale, clubs and subscriptions, ecommerce and tasting-room reservations, publishes a Lite plan at $59 a month with a 0% transaction fee up to $100K in annual DTC revenue and a Basic plan at $149 a month plus 1.5% up to $600K, checked September 2026 on Commerce7's pricing page.
Which row fits depends on how closely your program maps to the vendor's model. A platform built for wineries covers the standard club and tasting shape well. The wineries that do not fit are the ones with a process of their own: an allocation list where members buy by invitation and in order, a pickup party that is really an event with a headcount, a second location that pours but does not ship, a club where members build the case themselves from a release list, a vineyard that sells futures on barrels. Off-the-shelf software handles each of those one fixed way, or not at all, and the winery ends up keeping a second system in a spreadsheet.
Breweries
A brewery app is the same shape with different nouns.
Swap the vocabulary and the three jobs are still there. The one real difference is the box: beer to consumers is far more restricted than wine, and Washington's regulator says on the same page as its wine permit that beer cannot be shipped to consumers. A brewery app is therefore pickup-first by design, with shipping added only where a state allows it.
| At the winery | At the brewery |
|---|---|
| Tasting flight in a booked slot | Taproom flight, with table bookings on busy nights and release days |
| Wine club with a bottle allocation per run | Mug club: an annual fee, a numbered mug, discounted pours and member-only releases |
| Club release, chosen by the winemaker | Seasonal or barrel-aged release, with a pre-sale and a pickup day |
| Will-call case with a pickup window | Crowler and growler fills, ordered ahead and collected the same day |
| Direct shipping under state permits | Mostly pickup: beer to consumers is far more restricted, and some states rule it out entirely |
When to build your own
Building a winery app around your own club.
The honest reason to build your own winery app is not the subscription fee, it is fit. A club that allocates by invitation, a pickup window that doubles as a members' party, a tasting model with a host per table and a fee that disappears with a purchase, none of that is a setting in a generic booking tool. Teams whose process does not fit an off-the-shelf tool end up building their own, which is what Newly is for: describe the club you actually run, the tiers, the billing calendar, who can collect, which states you ship to, and it builds a real native app around your process instead of the vendor's.
Newly is $25 a month with no free plan. The iOS app ships through App Store Connect: the build is compiled and submitted for you, you test it on TestFlight, finish the listing and submit it for review, and the Apple Developer Program is a separate $99 a year. There are no Android release builds on the current version, which matters for a club whose members are split across both phones, so plan the iOS app first and keep email and the website for everyone else. The member record and the club-run rules are the part to settle on paper before anything is built; they are cheap to change until the first billing date.
Sources
Where the specifics came from.
Four things on this page come from a primary source rather than general industry practice:
FAQ
Winery apps, answered.
A winery app is the customer-facing and back-office software a winery uses for its direct-to-consumer business: booking tastings against time slots and capacity, running the wine club (billing the card on file on a fixed calendar, then shipping or holding the wine for pickup), and managing will call, the pickup window at the tasting room. Underneath all three sits one member record with age confirmation, card on file, club tier, fulfillment preference and the state the wine ships to.
Start with the member record, not the wine list.
Tastings, the club and will call all hang off one record: age, card, tier, fulfillment, state. Settle that on paper, then build the winery app around it in Newly.