A Plea to Wineries about Your Websites

A few times each year, I ask our team to share wines that they've loved or are planning to share with a special occasion. [For recent examples, check out the Our Most Memorable Wines of 2025 and the What the Tablas Creek team will be drinking with our Thanksgivings in 2025 blogs.] While some members of our team choose Tablas Creek for these pieces, most of the submissions feature other wineries around the state, country, and world. I try to link the wines that my team recommends to the appropriate pages on the producers' websites. That turns out to be harder each time than it seems like it should be. Why? Because it turns out that many wines, especially older vintages, don't have a page on winery websites.

That's a missed opportunity. And it's not the only one that I see too often one winery websites. The principal issues I see fall into three main categories.

Too much focus on story and practices and not enough on the wines themselves

This seems like a particularly big issue on European winery websites. Perhaps because they aren't as focused on direct-to-consumer sales, or perhaps because they're selling different wines in different markets, a lot of these websites have beautiful photography and prose about their vineyard and winemaking philosophy but comparatively little about the actual wines themselves. But I see this issue fairly often on domestic websites too.

No (or not enough) detail on back vintages or things that aren't currently for sale

On a lot of wineries' sites (in this case, especially in America) if a wine is not currently for sale, it's as though it doesn't exist. Many of these sites use their point-of-sale system's list of current items for sale as their main menu in their wines section. But something that's sold out? Or a past vintage? There may not be a page on it at all.

The useful stuff is stuck behind a login screen

This is an issue with some of the more cult-style wineries in America. If you're not a member, you're faced with a login screen. If you are a member, I can only assume that there is a wealth of information behind that login. But that's not a lot of help if you're visiting the site for some other purpose.

These three issues stem from the same mistake: building your website for a specific kind of user, and ignoring the needs of other users. After all, every winery is going to have a range of different users. Each user will have their own reasons when they're visiting the website. Thinking about your users and their goals is a great way to approach your website with fresh perspective. At Tablas Creek, we try to make sure that we've thought about the following list of users:

• Direct-to-consumer customers looking to buy our wine. This should be self-explanatory. Make sure that it's intuitive to research and purchase your wines, if like most wineries that's your goal. And make sure it's mobile-friendly; the majority of web traffic is now on phones and tablets.
• Wine club members. It's important not to overlook your core customer, which for most wineries is their wine club members. A member should be able to visit your site and see how to make the most of their membership, including what they'll be getting next, what's only available to them, and how to get into contact with a live person if they need help.
• Potential visitors. Consider the following questions. How easy and welcoming is it to make a tasting appointment? To see what you'll get when you come? To know costs and requirements?
• Consumers who may have our wines in their cellars. Collectors may want information about the wines years or even decades after a purchase. We try to provide tasting and production notes of back vintages as well as current, and to update those notes when we can. It's great to offer drinking windows and food pairing recommendations too.
• The people who are tasked with selling our wine via wholesale channels. Think sommeliers on the floor of restaurants, retail shop hosts, or the sales reps that work for distributors. Production notes, technical information, and reviews are key here, as is which distributor actually sells your wine in each of your markets.
• Fans looking for details on our events. I don't think that winery websites are great ways to promote events you're participating in. Email, text, or social media are all probably better for that. But people will come to your website for the details once they're interested, and be frustrated if they're not available.
• Media. I am always surprised how hard it is on many wineries' sites to get logos, high-resolution photographs, contact information, and details about key members of the team. The easier you make it for writers, the more likely it is that you'll be written about.

Those are, for me, the fundamental audiences we're designing for, and I suspect they're pretty universal. In addition, there are a few sub-audiences it's great to have content for if you can. In that list I'd have:

• People who want to see where your wines are for sale. If we were a big winery with most of our wine in distribution, this would be in the first list. But for us, it's a nice-to-have rather than a fundamental need. Several years ago we added a Find Our Wine tool that allows visitors to search by location for accounts that have bought our wine from a distributor in the last six months. It's gotten a lot of positive feedback.
• Casual browsers looking for a reason to connect with you. Oddly, this is something that most winery websites seem primarily focused on. From the detailed back-stories of a winery's founders to its history to videos about farming or winemaking, this sort of marketing content is something that can help turn casual interest into something more serious. But it's likely not answering a pressing need.

An important thing to remember is that people are almost always task-oriented when they visit a website. If you're not helping them get what they're looking for smoothly and in as few clicks as possible, you're probably frustrating them.

It's a good idea to periodically take someone not already familiar with your site and give them a set of tasks to complete. Sit and watch (and take notes on) how they click around the site, but don't offer advice. If it takes several clicks before they find the information, note that issue. It's amazing how little we analyze the sites that we're familiar with, particularly ones that we've helped create or use every day. Watching someone else struggle is illuminating and humbling and a great source of perspective.

Along those lines, I think it's always worth adding a search option to your website. You may think that your navigation is clear, but different people filter information in different ways. Having a search option helps unite visitors with their specific need and reduces frustration.

If I could make one final plea, it would be to keep information up to date. If your last harvest update is from 2021, or your last blog is from 2019, or your distributor list is from 2024, that's not a great look. And how about those tasting notes from that wine from 2015? It probably doesn't still taste the same as it did at bottling. And I know, it's not easy. We've updated our own distributor list already four times this year. But even worse than having no information is having wrong information, because it calls into question the credibility of what you do have.

I'm curious... are there things that you as a reader would add to this list, or emphasize differently? If so, please share!