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Modernizing Winery Operations: Callaway's Story with Blended
Founded in 1974 as the first winery in Southern California’s Temecula Valley, Callaway Vineyard & Winery has long stood as a symbol of innovation and heritage in the region. Originally launched by Eli Callaway—who famously went on to start Callaway Golf—the winery has passed through corporate ownership and scaled to a peak of 750,000 cases.
Today, the future is rooted in the past. Now family-owned by the Lin family, Callaway is embracing a premium, estate-only approach under the leadership of acclaimed winemaker Giovanni Verdejo. A native of Mexico City, Gio spent over two decades in Napa Valley crafting 90+ point wines for Foley Family Wines. Now, at Callaway, he leads a 10,000-case DTC-focused production that reflects both craft and character, with wines sold exclusively through their wine club and tasting room (named Newsweek Readers' Choice Best in the Nation, 2024).
To match this elevated vision, Gio and the Callaway team knew they needed technology aligned with their ambitions.
From: Legacy Software, Lagging Operations
When Gio arrived, Callaway was still using Winemaker’s Database (WMDB)—a system he knew well, but one that had become more of a regulatory database than an operational tool.
“It served its purpose. But we were doing most of our work in spreadsheets,” Gio explains. “It was slow, hard to use, and new team members couldn’t learn it quickly.”
The tech simply couldn’t keep up with the winery’s modern direction, nor with a winemaker accustomed to moving fast.
To: Flexible, Fast, and Built for Winemaking
When Gio began evaluating new solutions, he wasn’t just looking for another winemaking database—he needed a system that could move as quickly and flexibly as he does. That meant ditching rigid structures in favor of something flexible, intuitive, visual, and built around how winemaking workflows actually happen on the floor.
He found that in Blended’s protocol based system.
“With Blended, I’m not stuck managing ‘tank thinking.’ I can work by lots and move freely between tanks, barrels, and blends. The system doesn’t force me to work a certain way; it adapts to how I work.”
The ability to build and reuse protocols has completely changed how Callaway Winery manages daily work. Instead of re-entering the same steps across work orders, Gio creates flexible templates that capture everything—from rackings and additions to bottlings and harvest prep. It’s drag, drop, and done.
“I enter today’s updates and write work orders at the end of the day for the next day, and I’m finished in 15 minutes. Everything’s clear, up to date, and easy to see.”
Blended’s “shopping cart”–style interface shows what’s been created, what’s in progress, and what’s done—giving the team a shared, real-time picture of work across the cellar. The experience is so streamlined, Gio is considering dropping paper work orders altogether.
The results have been immediate:
“Bottling in Blended is 10x faster than before”
Work orders are faster to create, easier to review, and painless to modify
Mobile access means Gio and his team can work anywhere—not just from a desktop in the lab
But it’s not just about speed. It’s also about clarity.
“Blended’s visual history is a huge advantage. I can trace every action, every vessel, and every decision. If I ever ask myself, ‘Did we add sulfur?’ I can find the answer in seconds.”
With Blended, the team isn’t just logging data—they’re actually using it. Gio has full visibility into what’s happening across the winery, the freedom to design his own workflows, and the peace of mind that nothing is getting lost in translation.
“It’s faster, it’s more flexible, and honestly—it just works better.”
Fast Onboarding, Familiar Foundations
Onboarding new software—especially in a winery with deep history—can be a challenge. But for Gio and Callaway, the transition to Blended was surprisingly smooth.
“If you know WMDB, it’s easy to use Blended,” he says.
After a training session with Blended Founder Matt, Gio had everything he needed to get started. In fact, he canceled his follow-up call after returning from vacation—because he simply didn’t need it.
The setup process was fast, the system felt familiar, and Blended’s team was responsive throughout. No ticket queues, no delays—just direct support when it mattered.
Looking Ahead: Data-Driven Decisions, Done Better
With his first harvest in Blended on the horizon, Gio is already thinking bigger. One key focus: costing.
“More accurate COGs enabled by Blended is at the top of the list for next year.”
He’s also exploring a paperless cellar, leaning into Blended’s mobile tools and visual clarity. And with protocols ready and workflows refined, he’s heading into harvest fully prepared.
“We’re ready. I know it’s going to be so much faster. I’m going with the flow.”
Blended has helped Callaway honor its legacy while embracing a more modern, premium winemaking future—where data drives decisions, and nothing slows the craft.
Winemaking Production Software Software Callaway Vineyards and Winery Blended Technologies
Blended Raises $2.5M to Modernize Winery Operations
We're thrilled to announce that Blended has raised a $2.5 million Seed round to transform how wineries manage production, from vineyard to bottle.
The round was led by Bienville Capital Management, whose support affirms our vision: to build the next generation of winery operations software. With Blended, teams spend less time buried in data entry and more time making informed decisions in real time, ultimately running smarter, more efficient businesses.
Since launching in 2022, we’ve been on a mission to reimagine production management for modern wineries. Blended is designed to be the most flexible, intuitive platform on the market—adapting to how you make wine, not the other way around. By combining thoughtful design with the latest technologies like AI, we help teams replace spreadsheets, notebooks, and legacy software once and for all. From work orders and lab analysis to costing and case goods, Blended keeps everyone aligned and moving forward.
With this funding, we’re excited to:
Expand our engineering and product teams
Accelerate the development of Barry, our AI assistant for winemaking operations
Scale customer success as we support a fast-growing network of wineries across North America
To our early customers: thank you. Your belief in our mission and your honest, detailed feedback have been instrumental in shaping what Blended is today. And we’re just getting started.
If you’re a winemaker tired of juggling clipboards and late-night spreadsheets or battling clunky, outdated software, we’d love to show you what Blended can do.
Meet Barry: The Newest Member of Your Team
Ever wished work orders could create themselves? You know exactly what needs to be done, but turning that clear plan into a detailed work order takes digging through notes, typing it all out, and far too much of your time.
Meet Barry, Blended’s artificial intelligence designed specifically for wine production, and the newest member of your team. Barry is a digital assistant built to streamline your winery’s operations. In seconds, Barry can answer questions, record data, and write work orders for your team. The goal? To make you more efficient, so you can spend more time focused on crafting exquisite wines.
Barry lives within your instance of the Blended platform and is fully attuned to your winery’s unique processes. Think of it as your go-to expert, always ready to:
Answer Questions
Barry makes information retrieval a breeze. Simply ask, “Show me my chardonnays,” and Barry will display your current chardonnay lots along with relevant details.
Simplify Operations
Recording tasks has never been easier. Just describe what you’re doing, and Barry will handle the rest. For example: “Barry, record punch downs on Lots A, B, C, and D.”
Write Work Orders
Save time by letting Barry draft work orders for you. Say, “Barry, write a work order to add yeast and nutrients to Tank 1. Use our standard templates and assign it to Matt.” Barry generates the work order in seconds, ready for review or approval.
Enhance Collaboration
Barry empowers your entire team to interact with production data, regardless of their familiarity with the software. From cellar staff to winemakers, everyone can harness Barry’s capabilities to keep operations running smoothly.
At Blended, we’re building the next generation of winery operations software. Tools like Barry aren’t just about saving time—they’re about redefining how teams interact with production software to craft their next great vintage.
Want to see Barry in action?
Blended Welcomes Heather Crawford as VP of Growth
Blended Technologies is excited to announce the appointment of Heather Crawford as its new Vice President of Growth.
Heather, a seasoned leader at the intersection of the wine industry and technology, most recently served as an operations, sales and marketing leader at Vintrace. Her career has been defined by integrating cutting-edge technological solutions within some of the world’s leading wineries, including Treasury Wine Estates, Far Niente and Wente Vineyards.
With her proven commercial track record, Heather will focus on scaling Blended’s market presence and commercial operations. She will work alongside the Blended team and report directly to CEO, Matt Witte.
"Heather’s deep expertise in business development will be pivotal as we accelerate our growth," said Matt Witte, founder of Blended. "She has been a leader in winery operations software for many years, and her insights have helped drive innovation across the industry. We’re excited to harness her experience as we build the next generation of winery solutions."
About Blended
Blended is a modern, cloud-based software platform designed specifically for the winemaking industry. From managing vineyard data to streamlining production and inventory management, Blended provides wineries with the tools they need to stay organized, make data-driven decisions, and grow their businesses efficiently.
Edit Anything - No Exceptions, No Rollbacks
Imagine that you’re at the end of an intense harvest. You’ve been working 7 days a week for the last 6 weeks and are desperately trying to catch up on your record-keeping by entering data into your production software; somewhere along the way, you made a mistake. When you pressed, you accidentally flipped the volume for free run with the press cut that went into a red blend. You’re already dozens of entries past, and looking at a rollback that will mean hours more work redoing what you’ve already done. Painful right?
What if it didn’t have to be?
At Blended, we’re reimagining winery operations software. We believe that software can be smarter. It should fit your process better and enable your team to do what they do best without holding you back. One of the ways we are doing this is by making mistakes easy to fix because we’ve all been there, and it doesn’t have to be that difficult.
Edit Anything - No Exceptions, No Rollbacks
The Blended Data Engine is what makes all this possible. Every action recorded in Blended becomes part of a timeline. The Data Engine enables us to move backward or forward on that timeline and recreate the winery's state given those conditions. So, when a mistake in a blend happens, just edit it with the correct volumes, and the Data Engine ripples those changes forward to the present.
This same dynamic also applies to how data is entered into the system in the first place. Users have control over where any event falls on the timeline. That means events don’t need to be entered chronologically, and if you accidentally place events out of order, it’s easy to flip them around. This is the power of the Data Engine. In the future, we’ll even be able to show you forward simulations of your winery so that you can see how your work orders build upon each other, which could be helpful when you are playing tank jenga during harvest.
Don't miss Blended Tech at the 2024 North Coast Wine Industry Expo!
Blended: Simplifying Winery Management for Operations of All Sizes
Blended is a modern, cloud-based software solution designed to help wineries manage their operations. From small boutique operations to large-scale
Simulated Blend Trials on Blended Tech
The art of wine blending is where the skills of the finest winemakers truly shine. However, while taste is often the primary factor in determining blends, there’s also a broader picture to consider that can have significant business implications. Each blending component is often unique and may vary in variety, origin, chemistry, and production costs. Depending on the intended sales channel, some or all of these elements may be crucial to the commercial success of the finished wine.
After speaking with hundreds of winemakers, we’ve found that conducting blend trials is one of the most common workflows still performed with a spreadsheet. This holds true even if the winery uses winemaking software!
Feature: Trial Blend
Trial Blends is just one feature designed to help winemaking teams make more informed decisions with less effort. Since Blended already knows everything about your wines, tell us what you’re blending and we’ll simulate the important characteristics of the proposed blends.
For a given sample size, we calculate how much you need to add of each component, and sum them up so you know how much you have to pull from your lots.
For each trial blend, we show you the important characteristics of the blend. To ensure compliance with label requirements, we show you the overall composition:
- AVA
- County
- State
- Variety
- Clone
- Vintage
If you’ve entered cost information, we show a cost breakdown of each blend – something that can be very helpful, if for example you’re trying to create a price-conscious wine but you’re using large percentages of expensive lots to compose it.
We also make predictions about the important chemistry measurements of the blended wine:
- Alcohol
- free/molecular/total SO2
- pH (which is not just a simple average but calculates free H+ ion concentration)
- RS (residual sugar)
- TA (titratable acidity), and
- VA (volatile acidity)
Interested in learning how else we’re modernizing winemaking software? Contact us today to get a demo of our Trial Blends feature and all the other ways Blended Technologies can help you work smarter, not harder.
Modern Winemaking Software: Why Blended is Easy to Use
Software shouldn’t get in your way. When software doesn’t fit, you spend hours on workarounds, waste mental energy worrying about how you record activity in the system or give up entirely and go back to spreadsheets. At Blended, we’re on a mission to build software that’s smart. If Blended can learn how you operate, it can personalize your unique experience. This personalization empowers you and your team, making the software a seamless part of your workflow. While this is a journey, today, we leverage a feature called Adaptive Defaults to bring that personalization.
Feature: Adaptive Defaults
Adaptive Defaults are a memory of sorts. As you use Blended, it tracks how you operate. For example, Blended may notice that you like to sample Brix, pH, TA, and Seed Color in the vineyard. After it sees you take that grouping of measurements, it automatically creates a custom workflow for those measurements within the vineyard. The next time you sample grapes, you can easily select that grouping to record measurements across one or all of your blocks.
Another example might be when you are performing additions to your bulk wine. As you select the product, Blended will automatically suggest which batches the addition will come from based on your recent use.
Adaptive Defaults aren’t limited to Additions and Measurements. As you personalize your dashboards by editing columns or rearranging their order, Blended tracks your preferences and automatically configures itself the next time you look at that table or display. Bottling again? Blended remembers the formats you use rather than offering all possibilities. Finally, Blended remembers the data you like to track in the places you want to track it. We once had a client with a mix of rented and owned barrels. After telling Blended that a set of barrels was rented versus owned, Blended created a custom field and enabled that data to be captured by default on every subsequent barrel added to the system.
In isolation, these features are small. They’re not flashy or particularly visual. But you touch them every time you use Blended, and their impact is enormous over time. They are the little things that make life easier so that software can be a seamless addition to your process.
If you’d like to learn more about the Blended Winery Operations Platform, reach out at hello@blendedtech.com.
Inventory Management Made Easy On Blended
From a software perspective, Bottled inventory lives in no man’s land. It’s the place where operations software ends and point-of-sale and accounting systems begin. For many wineries, this mirrors the silos within functional teams as well. The winemaking team manages up to a point before it gets turned over to the tasting room staff and finance teams. Handoffs between people and systems are typical points of inefficiency. Put simply, they are areas where it's easy to drop the ball.
For wineries, that inefficiency takes the form of wasted time, inability to plan ahead, and lost revenue. Over the last few weeks, two conversations I had with the winery staff stand out in my mind. The first, with a winemaker, discussed how easy it was to lose track of inventory during busy seasons. Staff would move a few cases from the cellar to a tasting room and forget to record it. Inventories would get off from the official count quickly and they’d be forced to spend extra time tracking down the discrepancy. The second was with a tasting room manager. She shared half a dozen workarounds to record sales within their point of sale, all created so that she could track against the KPIs her team was measured against. What both had in common was they each had access to name-brand operational and point-of-sale software, and despite that, both turned to spreadsheets to get the job done.
Why? Ultimately, for both individuals, it came down to the systems’ inability to fit the reality of the work being done. Conversations like these set our direction when we designed Case Goods. We wanted a system that could fit how the work was being done. Here’s how we applied our guiding principles to case goods:
Be Ridiculously Fast and Easy To Use
Move inventory in pallets, cases, or bottles for any task in any unit
Update one allocation or bulk update many
Remove Knowledge Barriers
Automatically create tech sheets for any wine produced within Blended
View inventory by tax status or location from any date present or past
Data Is An Asset
Generate custom reports of how inventory has changed through time
Detailed use logs for every SKU to make finding and correcting discrepancies simple
But don’t take my word for it, take a look for yourself. If it looks interesting, we’d love to show you more about how Blended is changing the way wineries operate.
Winery Operations Inventory Management Case Goods Production Blended BlendedTech
About
We are a leader of high-quality wine accessories to wineries for their marketing and tasting room needs. We have over 2,000 wine accessories (corkscrews, coolers, glassware, decanters, wine racks, pourers, stoppers, etc.) from over 10 different countries worldwide. We do our own in-house imprinting on all the items we sell from laser engraving to full color decorating. We also have an extensive line of GLASSWARE (real glass or plastic) that we can laser engrave or rotary engrave or screen for your glassware needs.
Our benchmark for quality has always been the restaurant professional since the company started in 1970, so we are committed to selling the highest quality in our industries. We also have an extensive line of cheese boards and accessories also. We sell excellent quality at the lowest prices you can find. Franmara, Inc. has outgrown its original plant and now also warehouses in nearby facilities in Salinas, California. We are pleased that many of our employees have worked for Franmara for a decade or more. We strive to provide our employees with the best environment we can for them. Franmara’s facility runs on 100% renewable solar energy.
Please visit us at www.franmara.com or www.corkscrews.com. You can call us at 1-800-423-5855 for our latest catalog or email us at info@franmara.com.
About:
Franmara is a family-owned business since 1970 located in Salinas, CA. Franmara, Inc. has outgrown its original plant and now also warehouses in nearby facilities. We also now have an East Coast division that sells wine accessories. We are pleased that many of our employees have worked for Franmara for a decade or more. We strive to provide our employees with the best environment we can for them. Franmara’s facility runs on 100% renewable solar energy.
Franmara, Inc. is a manufacturer and master distributor of corkscrews, barware and wine accessories. The company was established in 1970. Franmara does not sell directly to the public. Our products are available through food service distributors, advertising specialty dealers, wineries, wine distributors, wine and liquor stores, gourmet shops, mail order catalog houses and other wholesalers and retailers.
The purpose of this web site is to provide information to our customers or future customers. It allows the public to see Franmara's products and inquire as to where they might be purchased. We want this site to be as helpful and informative as possible.
DOWNLOAD CATALOG AT:
http://www.zoomcatalog.com/catalogs/franmara-2016-no-pricing#/1/
Contact
Contact List
| Title | Name | Phone | Extension | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Service Mgr | Any Customer Service Person | orders@franmara.com | 831-422-4000 | |
| President | Frank Pat Chiorazzi | info@franmara.com | 831-422-4000 |
Location List
| Locations | Address | State | Country | Zip Code |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Franmara, Inc. | 560 Work St., Salinas | CA | United States of America | 93901 |
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