A winery website has to do three jobs that rarely get along: make a place feel worth the drive, take a tasting reservation without a phone call, and sell wine to people who may never visit. Many sites do the first well and handle the other two with a stack of bolted-on tools.
This guide is for owners and tasting room managers who want to know what the site itself should do, which parts are better bought than built, and where the rules for shipping wine start to matter.
A note on scope: the shipping and licensing pointers below link to official Washington sources and are not legal advice. Your licensing questions belong with the Liquor and Cannabis Board or your attorney.
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Start with the visit, not the wine
A first-time visitor is deciding whether to spend an afternoon with you. The pages that matter most are the ones people actually search for on their phone in the car: hours, directions, what a tasting costs, whether you need a reservation, whether dogs and kids are welcome, and where to park a group. Put all of it on the homepage or one tap away. Wine descriptions come second.
Photography does a lot of work here, but a gallery of vineyard sunsets cannot answer “can I bring eight people on Saturday.” Treat the site as a trip-planning tool first and a catalog second. If your winery sits inside a wider destination, our tourism website design guide covers how a visitor-facing site can also measure what it produced. If your guests stay at nearby inns, our bed and breakfast booking guide shows what those sites need.
Tasting room reservations
Reservations cut the phone calls, protect staff from walk-in surges, and let you take payment up front for experiences. You have three realistic paths.
- A winery commerce platform with reservations built in. As of October 2026, Commerce7’s pricing page lists “POS & Reservations” on every plan, alongside clubs, ecommerce and a CRM. This is the cleanest option if you want one system of record for guests.
- A dedicated reservation marketplace such as Tock, OpenTable or Resy. These can help with prepaid experiences and with being found by people browsing those apps. We could not retrieve current pricing from their sites, so ask each for a written quote and check whether any per-guest or per-booking fee lands on you or your guest.
- A simple booking widget on your own site, sometimes a plugin, sometimes a form that emails the tasting room. Fine for a small room with a few seatings a day. It breaks when you need deposits, capacity per time slot, or any report.
Whichever you pick, ask four questions. Does the guest stay on your site or get sent to someone else’s brand? Can you export every guest’s name and email? Does it control capacity by time slot so you cannot overbook? And what happens to the booking when you change your hours?
Wine club signups
The club signup should be offered at the moments people feel good about your wine: at the end of a tasting booking confirmation, on every wine page, and as a card in the shop checkout. It should not be a link in the footer.
A good signup page states the shipment schedule, what a typical shipment contains, the discount in plain terms, how to skip or cancel, and the full price including shipping. Hiding the cancel policy invites chargebacks and bad reviews. Most winery platforms handle clubs natively (Commerce7 lists “Clubs & Subscriptions” on every plan), so you rarely need to build this yourself.
Online sales and shipping, with the compliance pointers
Selling wine online is two problems: the shop experience and the rules about where a bottle may go. The platforms differ mostly in how much of the second problem they carry for you. As of October 2026:
- Vinoshipper lists pay-as-you-go pricing with no fixed monthly fee: 1.85% + $0.75 per item for shipped e-commerce and club orders, plus 2.9% payment processing. It states that it remits sales tax and runs a compliance engine and state reports.
- Commerce7 lists Lite at $59 per month with a 0% transaction fee (up to $100K in annual direct-to-consumer revenue), Basic at $149 per month with 1.5% (up to $600K) and Pro at $399 per month with 1% (up to $4M), with larger plans above that.
- WineDirect lists DTC Starter at $79 per month with a 2% transaction fee and a $399 one-time onboarding fee, and DTC Pro at $199 per month with 1% and a $999 onboarding fee.
Payment processing, shipping and tax are usually separate lines, so compare on your real order mix rather than the headline.
Where shipping rules come in, the official starting points are the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board’s pages on direct shipping laws and internet sales of alcohol. Among the points the LCB’s direct shipping page makes (much of it addressed to out-of-state wineries shipping to Washington consumers): any sale to a Washington consumer is considered a sale in Washington; shipping containers must be labeled that the package cannot be delivered to a person under 21 or a person who appears intoxicated; and wine shipper permit and certificate-of-approval holders must file monthly reports, even in months with no sales. The internet sales page adds that if you use a third party for online payments, an online shop or delivery, the LCB must approve the contract first, and it says it looks for a flat service fee per transaction rather than a percentage of sales. Several platforms above list percentage fees, so ask any vendor how its contracts work for Washington licensees. Read those pages yourself, because they apply differently depending on your license type and where your customers are, and confirm with the LCB or counsel.
For your website, the practical consequence is that shipping logic belongs in the store, not in a PDF on a page. The site should only offer a state at checkout if you can legally and operationally ship there.
Age gates: useful, but know what they do
The “are you 21” screen on a winery homepage is a convention, not a compliance system. It stops no determined person and it adds a click for everyone else, including search engines and social previews if built carelessly. Use a light one if your insurer or brand wants it, and make sure it does not block crawlers from reading the page.
The checks that carry weight happen at the point of sale and the point of delivery. Collect a date of birth at checkout for shipped orders, and make sure your carrier arrangement and package labels reflect the delivery rules above.
Events, private groups and the calendar
Give each event type (private tastings, club pickup parties, weddings, corporate groups) its own page with capacity, what is included, and an inquiry form that asks date, headcount and budget. That filters out casual inquiries and gives you something to quote from. A public calendar helps only if someone updates it. If your platform cannot publish events from the same place you manage them, the calendar will go stale, and a stale calendar is worse than none.
Booking and visitor data
Every reservation, shop order and club signup is a record of who came and why. Your goal is one place where those records meet, so you can answer: how many first-time visitors became club members, which events produce repeat buyers, and which bookings came from search versus a partner listing. Tag your booking links so the source is visible, keep a single guest list rather than three, and insist on being able to export your data, because that export is what you keep if you ever leave a platform.
If your operation outgrows packaged tools, for example custom event pricing tied to production schedules, or reservations that need to sync with your harvest and tank calendar, that is when a purpose-built system starts to beat stitched-together apps. Our guide to custom software for small business is the filter we use before anyone writes a line of code.
The honest verdict
Buy off the shelf for the commerce, club and reservation engine. The established winery platforms exist because the compliance and tax logic is hard, and rebuilding it is almost never the right call. Put a well-designed, fast site in front of it that answers visit questions in seconds, and connect the pieces so the data lands in one place.
Talk to us when the website itself is the problem (it is slow, hard to update, or looks nothing like your wine), or when your operation has needs no platform meets and the numbers justify a build. For the site layer, start with our website design packages.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a winery website include?
Start with the visit: hours, directions, tasting prices, reservation booking, group and pet policies. Then add a wine shop with clear shipping information, a wine club signup that states the schedule and cancel terms, event pages with inquiry forms, and a way to capture email. Make it fast on a phone, since many visitors search from the car. Connect the booking, shop and club tools so guest data lands in one place you can export.
Do I need a separate tool for tasting room reservations?
Not always. Some winery commerce platforms include reservations and point of sale, which keeps guest records in one system. Marketplaces such as Tock, OpenTable or Resy can add discovery and prepayment but have their own fees and branding. A simple form or plugin works for a small room with few seatings. Choose based on whether you need deposits, capacity limits per time slot and data export, and ask every vendor for a written quote.
Can I ship wine to customers in other states?
It depends on your license, the destination state and the permits involved, so this is a question for the regulator or an attorney rather than a web designer. In Washington, the Liquor and Cannabis Board publishes pages on direct shipping and internet alcohol sales that explain requirements such as permits, package labeling and monthly reports. Many winery platforms include compliance tooling, but you remain responsible for confirming that you may ship to each state you enable at checkout.
Is an age gate on my winery homepage required?
An age gate is a common convention but not a substitute for real checks. The controls that matter happen at checkout and delivery: collecting a date of birth for shipped orders and using a carrier process and package labeling that reflect the delivery rules. If you add a homepage gate, keep it light and make sure it does not stop search engines from reading your pages. Confirm any specific obligations with the Liquor and Cannabis Board or your attorney.