I recently spent a day at Florence Cellars as they opened their tasting room in downtown Woodinville WA. 

Big congratulations to their team!. There was great energy and a strong turnout. It was a fantastic opening day all around.  

Opening day is always revealing. It’s not about whether your POS works in theory. It’s about how everything holds up when the room fills and guests are standing in front of you. 

You start hearing real-world questions: What happens if the terminal drops connection? How do we start a tab?  Why isn’t the tip option showing?  Can we add a library bottle as a SKU right now? 

None of it is catastrophic of course, but even small friction feels bigger in a busy tasting room. 

And honestly, the most important conversations weren’t about the POS at all. They were about hospitality. 

How do we greet guests when seats are full? Who manages flow?  How do we make this feel welcoming when most of the team aren’t career servers, but people who care deeply about the winery? 

That’s where systems matter most. 

The goal isn’t to turn a winery into something corporate. The goal is to set things up well enough that technology fades into the background and the winery’s personality can come forward. 

Opening day isn’t about perfection. It’s about alignment. 

I wrote more about what opening day teaches you on the PromoLab blog if you’re interested. https://www.promolab.com/post/opening-a-winery-tasting-room-here-s-what-you-actually-learn-on-day-one

Cheers!

A question I’ve been thinking about lately: Do your tasting room systems actually work together,  or do they just coexist? 

For many small WA wineries, the setup feels fine on the surface. You launch ecommerce. You add a POS. You manage your clubs. You run reports. 

Sure everything functions. But a few deeper questions tend to reveal where things get… shall we say, murky. 

• Does tasting room purchase history show up cleanly in online customer records? 
• If someone joins your club at the counter, does that status automatically reflect in your segmentation? 
• When inventory changes, does every channel update right away? 
• Can you pull one report that includes tasting room, online, and event sales - and trust it? 

Or is the answer sometimes… “Well… kind of.” 

That “kind of” is where small inefficiencies hide - extra exports, reconciliations, double-checking reports. 

For small winery teams wearing multiple hats, clarity matters. 

If you were building your tasting room systems from scratch today, would you design them to integrate from day one? 

I wrote more about this here for WA wineries who are thinking about simplification and connected systems: 

https://www.promolab.com/shopify-pos-for-wineries 

Photo Credit - Richard Duval Images - www.winepix.net

Hello WIN community! Jim Drake here, founder of PromoLab. 

PromoLab is a Pacific Northwest–based digital commerce and marketing consultancy focused on wineries and wine-adjacent brands. For more than 25 years, I’ve worked at the intersection of web development, ecommerce, branding, and operations, helping wineries turn their digital presence into something that actually supports how they sell wine day to day.

Much of our work centers on connecting tasting rooms, wine clubs, and online sales into a single, cohesive system, rather than a collection of disconnected tools. That means thinking beyond websites alone and into real-world winery realities: compliance, fulfillment, POS workflows, inventory, reporting, and long-term scalability.

I’ve had the privilege of working closely with Washington wineries for decades, including long-standing relationships with producers like Quilceda Creek and many others across the region. That experience has shaped how PromoLab works: practical, custom solutions designed to fit how wineries actually operate, not generic templates or one-size-fits-all platforms.

I joined WIN because it’s one of the few places where thoughtful conversations about the business side of wine really happen. In future posts, I’ll be sharing insights from the field, especially around modern winery commerce, Shopify, POS systems, and ways PNW wineries can simplify and future-proof their sales channels as they grow.

If you ever want to compare notes, ask a question, or sanity-check an idea, I’m always happy to connect. Looking forward to being part of the conversation here.

Cheers! 

- Jim