vintrace gets Shannon Family of Wines' newly acquired facility ready for harvest in just one week

Like many vintrace clients, Shannon Family of Wines started with bulk wine, barrel and tank tracking before adding bottling and incoming supply quality assurance. All quality control documentation received from suppliers is scanned and uploaded into vintrace, keeping everything in one place. Prior to vintrace, there was a lot of precious floor space dedicated to paper and filing cabinets. “Now, we use that space for more important items.”

The Unexpected

Two days before the 2020 harvest, Merrilees was presented with a massive project to integrate the newly acquired Steele Winery facility – where everything was tracked with ink, paper, and spreadsheets – into the Shannon Family of Wines operation. The site had 18 staff members, tanks, barrels, bulk wine, incoming grapes, plus non-wine consumables such as additives and packaging.

For most wine companies, the scale of this sort of systems integration project would have been punted to the “off-season,” something to be addressed between February and June. They would compromise their quality standards and put up with the limitations of paper recordkeeping for one more season.

Merrilees and her core staff of four were already using vintrace, so they didn’t have to wait. Teaming with vintrace Technical Support, they quickly added the Steele site into their system. vintrace provided the Google Sheets templates with a tab for wines, tanks, dip charts, barrels, vintages, appellations, and lab data. Merrilees went into divide and conquer mode, assigning tabs to each team member, who spent a few days collecting and entering baseline data. Then vintrace’s team took over to build a functioning database. At the acquired site, ‘the spreadsheet, pen and paper gang’ were trained to use vintrace simultaneously.

The results were impressive. Merrilees explains, “Once uploaded, it worked. We were able to do both training and data in just a week. Already having staff who understood vintrace made it easy to get everyone on board quickly.” For Shannon Family of Wines, system integration was achieved a year ahead of a typical winery’s schedule.

While there is a single database for the two facilities, vintrace makes it easy for Merrilees to create visibility rules. For example, each winery’s cellar staff sees what is in their facility, but the accounting team can see everything.

Next Steps

Shannon Family of Wines is currently adding the vintrace vineyard module. Having successfully organic-certified 900 of their 1200 planted acres and now adopting regenerative farming techniques, they need to keep an even closer eye on vine health and predators. The viticulture team makes good use of vintrace’s photo attachment features, which allows anyone to see exactly what the person walking the rows saw. It also builds a historical database for future reference.

Finally, Merrilees is impressed with how vintrace continuously innovates and updates all aspects of their software, invoicing, lot tracking, barrel management, allergen and safety tracking, and so much more. “The technology is always improving with updates occurring every two weeks.”