On September 1, Vintiga and Cépage DTC Strategies hosted 25 DTC leaders from across the Willamette Valley for a working session at Résonance Winery in Carlton, Oregon, including some of the largest wineries in Oregon. No sales pitch, just a real conversation about the future of winery DTC.
Instead of dwelling on how hard direct-to-consumer wine sales have gotten, we framed the whole conversation around a simple idea: this is the new reality of DTC, and here’s what you can actually do inside it to increase retention, grow revenue, and grow wine club membership. The reception was excellent.
Built from the front of house, not a spec sheet
The reaction that stuck out most wasn’t about any single feature. It was how many people said some version of the same thing: this is the first time someone built a system around how a winery actually operates, instead of asking the winery to operate around the system.
That’s a deliberate choice. Vintiga is designed from the front-of-house perspective first, meaning the starting point is a host on the floor mid-conversation with a guest, not a features checklist. For a room full of people who run tasting rooms for a living, that distinction was the thing that made the rest of the presentation land.
The winery DTC features that got people leaning in
A few specific pieces of the platform generated the most interest in the room:
Voice notes in the winery POS. Hosts can capture what a guest actually says, their preferences, an upcoming anniversary, a wine they raved about, without stopping to type it in. People immediately saw the time savings and, just as importantly, the better guest data that comes from capturing it in the moment instead of trying to remember it later.
The multi-location dashboard. For wineries running more than one tasting room, seeing performance across every location in a single view, rather than piecing together separate reports, was an easy yes.
Campaigns and Brand Kits. The ability to put together a professional, on-brand campaign quickly, without waiting on a designer every time, stood out to teams who are already stretched thin.
Digital wallet passes. The newest action buttons drew real interest, specifically the ability to connect guests directly to things like reservations, upcoming shipments, events, and wine club information right from the pass in their phone’s wallet.
Multi-brand support. Several wineries asked directly about running multiple brands inside one system. For larger and growing winery groups, that’s clearly not a nice-to-have, it’s a requirement.
Commerce7 integration. For teams already running Commerce7, having a practical way to add Vintiga’s guest intelligence and engagement tools on top, without replacing what they already have, made the decision to get started feel a lot lower-stakes.
Validation, not just interest
Nobody in the room needed to be convinced that DTC has gotten harder. That wasn’t news to anyone there. What they were looking for, and what this conversation was actually able to give them, was a real answer to what to do about it.
That’s the conversation we want to keep having. If your team wasn’t in the room at Résonance and you want to see what got people talking, reach out or book a demo.