Every guest who walks into a tasting room is already carrying a phone. That’s not new. What’s changed is what that phone can hold: a digital pass, sitting in Wallet, that doesn’t need an app. Most wineries still treat that pass, if they use one at all, as a digital punch card. A pass on its own, without a unified guest profile behind it, isn’t much more than a digital punch card. Hook it up to one, and it becomes something else entirely: one more channel in the marketing mix, sitting right alongside email and text, with strengths neither of those has on its own.
Why a Digital Wallet Pass Works Alongside Email and Text, Not Instead of Them
Email and text still do real work, and neither is going anywhere. A newsletter still needs to land in an inbox. A same-day alert still needs to reach a phone in seconds. A digital pass adds something neither of those can do: it lives on the phone screen without ever being sent, it can update itself in real time instead of requiring a new message, and it can surface at the exact moment it’s useful, when a guest is near the winery (more on how that works below), when a reservation is coming up, when a club shipment just went out. Nobody has to open it. It’s just there.
That’s the actual case for the digital pass: not a replacement for email or SMS, but a third channel with its own strengths, another way to reach a guest that adds consistency and personalization to every touchpoint they have with a winery. Actually pulling that off, turning a pass into something that knows a guest instead of just holding a barcode, is a different problem. More on that below.
What Apple’s New Wallet Update Can Actually Do Now
Apple’s WWDC 2026 update to Wallet, shipping this fall with iOS 27, adds a handful of features worth knowing about. For the technical details, see Apple’s developer documentation.
Featured Actions. Up to two tappable tiles can now appear directly on the front of any pass, not just event tickets, where this was previously limited. A guest pulls up their pass a few days after a visit and sees a live action sitting right on it, maybe how close they are to a club threshold, or an invite to next month’s release. No notification to miss. No new message going out.
Tap to Share. A new way to capture a first-time guest’s contact and shipping info with a single tap between two iPhones, no form involved.
Poster Generic. A new pass style that lets artwork fill the entire card, edge to edge, behind the logo and key fields, so a pass can represent the brand it came from, label art and all, instead of a generic card.
Create a Pass. A guest can turn a physical loyalty card into a digital one just by photographing it, no setup required on the business’s end.
The Pass Was Already Bigger Than People Give It Credit For
This isn’t a niche behavior waiting to catch on. Worldwide, 4.4 billion people already carry a digital wallet, more than half the global population (Juniper Research, 2025). In the U.S., digital wallets already lead online spending at 40% of e-commerce value, ahead of credit cards, and account for 17% of POS value in stores. (Worldpay, 2026 Global Payments Report). And the average U.S. consumer holds 17.9 loyalty program memberships (Bond Brand Loyalty, 2023), a record high, and more than anyone is realistically keeping as separate apps.
That last number is really the whole argument. Nobody is downloading eighteen apps to keep up with eighteen loyalty programs. A pass just sits in the wallet, waiting, next to everything else a guest is already carrying.
Where Vintiga Already Fits
None of this does much for a winery whose guest data lives in five different places. Featured Actions, the tappable tiles Apple just added to the front of a pass, have nothing to show on a pass with no real guest data behind it. Tap to Share can capture a name and an email, but only a system already tied to a POS and CRM turns that into an actual guest record instead of one more list to reconcile later. The pass technology itself is free and available to any business as of this fall. What decides whether a winery gets real value out of it is whether there’s already a guest profile sitting behind the pass, ready to plug in.
That’s exactly what Vintiga provides. A guest’s pass already shows their name, how long they’ve been a customer, club status, loyalty points, and account balance – real customer information, not a guess. Getting that pass onto a guest’s phone doesn’t take downloading an app: anyone with an email on file, a club member, a newsletter signup, any customer record Vintiga can reach, can get a link to add their pass to their wallet with one click. A winery migrating guests off an old physical club card uses that same email path.
That profile exists because Vintiga unifies guest data across the systems and applications a winery already runs, Commerce7 included. Vintiga can also handle it all directly, reservations, POS, payments, email, and SMS, in one place.
What’s coming next builds on that same foundation. Notifications aren’t live yet, they’re currently in development, but here’s a sense of where they’re headed: a guest walks near the winery and their pass surfaces “Stop by today, members get 50% off tastings through Thursday.” A guest near a restaurant or shop that carries the wine gets a notification that it’s sold right there, or that it is “30% off this week at [retailer]” the moment they’re close enough for it to matter. These notifications are free to send, unlike a text message, and they only show up when it’s actually relevant, then disappear once a guest is out of range.
The same pass can also respond to what’s happening on a member’s account. A club order two weeks out can show “Tap to customize your order before it ships.” An order that’s already shipped can say “Your order’s on its way.” A card on file about to expire can say “Update your payment info to keep your shipment on time.” Right now, these types of reminders go out as email, easy to lose in a crowded inbox. On the pass, it’s sitting right on the phone screen, a lot harder to miss than one more email a guest meant to get back to.
A winery without a unified guest profile is starting from zero, exactly at the moment this tech is becoming a whole lot more valuable.
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