Winery Wastewater Is a Resource Hiding in Plain Sight On this and related water-cost issues,  Recovered Water Solutions  works with wineries and processors to better understand water use, identify loss points, and develop practical recovery and reuse strategies that improve cost control, efficiency, and long-term resilience. Don't forget Winesecrets for: Premium Grape Spirits for Precision Adjustment Precision Filtration. Less Loss. Better Outcomes. Call or email  Eric@winesecrets.com  for more information about ou

The wine industry has been contracting for years. Tasting room traffic is down. Wine clubs are stalling. Wineries are closing. If your financial system isn't built for this, here's what to fix first. You probably know at least one winery that has closed in the last year or two. Maybe more than one. That's not a coincidence. That's a contracting industry — and the wineries that are surviving are the ones that can see their numbers clearly enough to make fast, smart decisions when it counts. So here's the question: can you actually trust your financial numbers? Not "do you have reports." Everyone has reports. The question is whether your reports are telling you something real — something you can act on. Or whether you open QuickBooks, look at the screen, and feel a vague sense of unease because something feels off but you can't quite put your finger on it. If it's the latter, this is not a "you" problem. It's a system problem. Winery bookkeeping isn't like normal bookkeeping. You're mana

Winery Wastewater Is a Resource Hiding in Plain Sight On this and related water-cost issues, Recovered Water Solutions works with wineries and processors to better understand water use, identify loss points, and develop practical recovery and reuse strategies that improve cost control, efficiency, and long-term resilience. Don't forget Winesecrets for: Premium Grape Spirits for Precision Adjustment Precision Filtration. Less Loss. Better Outcomes. Call or email Eric@winesecrets.com for more information about our water recovery and resuse services. Or visit recwatersolutions.com. Toll Free: (888) 656-5553 Direct: (707)329.6411

National Direct Sales Report Webinar this Friday Date: January 16, 2026 Time: 11am PST Register: https://wineindustryadvisor.com/event/vinoshipper-2026-national-direct-sales-report/ Vinoshipper releases its 2026 National Direct Sales Report this Friday with a webinar and full report. The data is clear: growth is no longer happening by chance. Wineries that invested in clubs saw better outcomes. Events drove engagement and loyalty. And producers who know their metrics are making smarter decisions because of it. Join Friday's webinar for the key takeaways, then dig into the full report released the same day. Register now

Introducing the Verdi Smart Valve Precision irrigation depends on one thing: knowing that every irrigation is delivered exactly as planned. For specialty crop growers managing multiple blocks, varied valve sizes, and rising production costs, achieving that level of control and visibility has often been difficult. Verdi’s new Smart Valve changes that. Each wireless unit enables remote control, real-time irrigation verification, flow-based scheduling, and water-use reporting, all powered by the Verdi Dashboard. It’s available in a full range of sizes from 1 inch to 4 inches. Built for Today’s Challenges Growers across specialty crops, from orchards and vineyards to berries and vegetables, are dealing with rising input costs, labor shortages, and increasing pressure to optimize resources. Many are navigating tighter margins while striving to maintain quality and compliance. The Smart Valve fills a critical gap in the market for growers who need automation that&rsq

Walk into almost any winery this week and you’ll see the same thing: equipment everywhere, barrels tucked into every open spot, and crews doing their best to move fruit through a cellar that already feels packed. Harvest always brings some level of chaos, but this year the space squeeze seems to be hitting harder than usual. And when the cellar is this tight, it quietly changes how winemakers make decisions. Not in big, obvious ways — but in the small, practical choices that add up over the course of a vintage. That’s where the hidden costs start to show themselves. 1. Lots Are Being Shifted Earlier Than Planned A full cellar forces movement. Not thoughtful, deliberately timed movement — just movement. When every open vessel is already promised to incoming fruit, winemakers end up: racking earlier transferring before a lot is truly settled finishing fermentations in whatever vessel is available consolidating lots sooner than planned None of these decisions a

The Post-Harvest Drop-Off Fall brings a flurry of activity to wine country. Tasting rooms fill with eager visitors, social media buzzes with harvest photos, and the energy is palpable. Then November arrives, and for many wineries, engagement plummets. According to Silicon Valley Bank's 2024 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Survey, the average winery converts less than 15% of harvest event attendees into repeat customers by year-end. This represents an enormous missed opportunity. The wineries that thrive year-round don't view harvest as a seasonal peak but as the starting point of a strategic customer journey.  Harvest Is Your Customer Acquisition Funnel Stop thinking of harvest events as isolated experiences and start viewing them as the top of your sales funnel. Smart consumer brands recognize that seasonal events provide a prime opportunity to collect valuable customer data while creating memorable brand experiences. These touchpoints become the first step in an ongoing relat

Walk into any cellar this season and you’ll see barrels in every stage of life — new, neutral, recoopered, or quietly leaking in the corner. The challenge isn’t just keeping up with what you have; it’s knowing which barrels are still earning their place. In a softer market, where margins are thin and cellar space is tight, every barrel decision carries more financial weight than it used to. Replacing by habit no longer makes sense. Instead, wineries are learning to treat barrels like what they really are — long-term assets that deserve the same attention and strategy as any other part of production. The Barrel ROI Framework: Knowing When It’s Time Every barrel has a life cycle — and like any asset, there’s a point where the cost of keeping it outweighs its return. Instead of guessing, wineries can look at the decision through a simple ROI equation: Barrel ROI = (Years in Use × Oak Value) – Maintenance Cost – Risk of Loss

Until now, getting reliable weather and soil data meant installing and maintaining a physical weather station, or relying on generic, imprecise forecasts. Verdi Weather changes that. This new feature gives you hyper-local weather data, right inside your Verdi dashboard. Powered by Precip, it puts actionable insights exactly where growers make irrigation decisions. Why We Built It Every week, growers make irrigation decisions that directly affect yield, quality, and costs. But too often, those decisions rely on assumptions, not field-specific data. “Knowing how much rain fell yesterday, last week, or across the whole season changes everything,” says Nart Barileva, Verdi’s Head of Data. “Precip’s data fills that gap instantly.”With Verdi Weather, there’s no hardware to buy or maintain. It’s already embedded in your dashboard, and the data is specific to your farm. What You Can See When you open the Verdi Dashboard, click the new Weather bu

Hear me out Up and down the California Coast, we got some rain last week. Up North, places got around 1.3” with up to 2” closer to the ocean. Down south in Paso Robles, we’re looking similar numbers of between 1.5” and 2”. So, one would naturally think that if we were irrigating post-harvest (as we highly recommend), we can stop now. As you may have suspected by the title of this article, that may or may not be the case. Profile Picture Here at AV, we love looking at soil moisture charts. However, in the case of rainfall, it can be misleading. Looking at the graph below, you can see that irrigations produce a clear spike indicating how deeply water percolated and how long it took to be completely depleted by plant roots. Rain doesn’t deliver the same concentrated volume you’re used to getting with a drip emitter. Therefore it doesn’t infiltrate the soil in the same way. You may see shallower percolation from the inch plus of rain we got