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December and January are some of the most important months for winery operations. They sit between the busiest tasting room season of the year and the planning window where general managers and DTC managers set goals for the next twelve months.
Most wineries jump straight into planning. New club ideas. New tasting experiences. New promotions. But the work that actually enables better decisions is simpler and easier to skip: clean data, clean systems, and clean reporting.
A Q1 DTC reset helps wineries enter the new year with clarity instead of guesswork. It is the difference between managing reactively and leading proactively. This post walks through how to use this season to tune up your winery POS, wine club software, and larger winery software stack so 2026 is built on a stronger foundation.
1. Reset Your Winery POS for Better Tasting Room Decisions
The tasting room generates some of the most valuable insights in your business. How guests buy, which experiences they respond to, which flights convert to clubs, and where bottlenecks form all live inside your winery POS.
The problem is that by the end of the year, many wineries are working with POS data that is incomplete or inconsistent. Product naming drifts. Devices are still assigned to locations that no longer exist. Tender types are used differently across staff. Member lookups are handled in different ways. All of this makes it harder to trust end of year reporting.
A Q1 reset focuses on two goals: clear workflows for staff and clear signals for reporting.
What to review in your winery POS
| Area | What To Look At | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Products and categories | Are products named and categorized in a consistent way for staff and reporting. | Prevents the same wine from appearing multiple times and splitting sales data. |
| Locations and devices | Do TabletPOS locations and devices still match how you pour and sell today. | Makes tasting room performance easier to compare across rooms, patios, or events. |
| Tender types | Are cash, card, club, and comps used consistently across the team. | Ensures your reports reflect real behavior and not habits or workarounds. |
A well configured winery POS does more than process payments. It tells you which experiences lead to sales, which price points convert well, and where training gaps exist. If your reports cannot answer those questions, configuration cleanup will have a bigger impact than any new campaign.
2. Reset Your Wine Club Software With a Retention Lens
Wine clubs succeed or struggle based on two simple numbers: how much members spend each year and how long they stay.
In practice, very few wineries track either one well. Scorecard insights show that most wineries do not regularly gather feedback from club members and do not monitor changes in average annual member spend. That makes club management more reactive than strategic.
Questions to ask about your wine club
| Question | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Did total membership really grow this year? | If you added as many members as you lost, you did a lot of work with no net gain. You want to know if you are growing, holding, or quietly shrinking. |
| How did average annual member spend change? | A drop in annual spend is often the earliest warning sign of future churn. An increase shows that benefits and communication are hitting the mark. |
| Do you know why members leave? | Even a short exit survey or follow up email can reveal simple fixes that reduce churn in the next cycle. |
When your wine club software is organized and your data is clean, you can see the real story of your club. Instead of guessing at what might keep members, you can design benefits, pricing, and communication around what your best members already do.
3. Reset Your Winery Software Data Before You Upgrade Reporting
Most wineries want better reporting. They want to see tasting room trends, club retention, winery ecommerce performance, and campaign impact in one place. That kind of insight depends entirely on the data feeding it.
If contact records are duplicated, club statuses are out of date, product names are inconsistent, and segments are not defined, even the best dashboard will produce noisy answers. The quieter weeks around the new year are the ideal time to clean the foundation.
High impact data cleanup areas
| Area | What To Do |
|---|---|
| Contacts and members | Merge obvious duplicates, confirm email and state where possible, and align club statuses so active, paused, and cancelled members are accurate. |
| Products | Standardize product names, assign clear categories, and archive old SKUs so sales and inventory reports are not distorted. |
| Locations and devices | Update your winery POS setup to match current tasting spaces, pop up locations, and event use so performance reporting reflects reality. |
| Segments | Tag visitors, members, locals, tourists, gift buyers, and event guests so outreach is focused instead of generic. |
This work does not require new tools. It requires intentional time. The payoff is that your winery software starts telling a clearer and more reliable story. When you do upgrade reporting in the future, you will see insights you can trust instead of conflicting signals.
4. Use Your Q1 Reset To Prepare For Better Reporting
As winery software evolves, stronger reporting is becoming a competitive advantage. Wineries that prepare now will get more value from the next generation of dashboards for wine club managers, DTC managers, and general managers.
A reporting upgrade is only as strong as the data underneath it. Doing the cleanup now means that when more advanced reporting becomes available, your winery will be ready to use it on day one instead of spending Q1 fixing old issues.
Think of this work as laying the track for the insights you want. If you know you want to track wine club retention, DTC wine sales, tasting room revenue, and winery ecommerce performance more clearly in 2026, start by making sure those numbers can be measured accurately.
5. Decide What To Double Down On And What To Pause
Once you have cleaned up your data and reviewed your DTC performance, the most valuable step is choice. You cannot invest everywhere. You can choose to invest where the data shows real impact.
A simple way to review your 2025 efforts
| Bucket | Double Down If | Pause If |
|---|---|---|
| Tasting room initiatives | They clearly raised average order value, club conversions, or tips, and staff found them easy to execute. | They created bottlenecks, confusion, or required workarounds in your winery POS. |
| Wine club programs | Annual member spend increased and members stayed longer. | Membership stayed flat and members did not mention or use the benefits. |
| Winery ecommerce campaigns | You can tie them to real orders, repeat visits, or list growth. | You cannot connect them to sales, and they mainly produced impressions. |
This simple review helps you focus on the programs that produce repeatable revenue and set aside the ones that only consume time.
Your Q1 DTC Reset Checklist
- Review your winery POS data for accuracy and alignment with current tasting room workflows.
- Merge duplicate contacts and confirm basic information such as email and state.
- Standardize product names and categories so reporting is clean and consistent.
- Verify club statuses and clean up churn records so retention metrics are accurate.
- Gather simple member feedback using short surveys or follow up emails.
- Identify your top converting tasting experiences for club signups and higher order values.
- Review your winery ecommerce checkout performance and cart abandonment behavior.
- Set 2026 metrics for wine club retention, DTC wine sales, and tasting room revenue.
- Make a short list of reporting questions you want answered each month.
The Takeaway
A clean, intentional start to the year creates clarity for everything that follows. Your winery POS, wine club software, and winery ecommerce tools all rely on accurate data to support good decision making. Taking time now to reset your DTC operations will make your 2026 planning smarter, faster, and more closely aligned with your real revenue drivers.
If you want help reviewing your systems or getting ready for a reporting upgrade, vinSUITE can walk you through where your data stands today and which improvements will make the biggest impact.
Talk to vinSUITE about optimizing your winery software setup: request a DTC systems review and start 2026 on a stronger foundation.