Wine club operations
CellarShip keeps your member list, your allocation, your hold and skip requests and your state rules on one board, so release week stops being a workbook with nine tabs and a color code only you understand. Pick, pack, and hand the driver a clean manifest the same afternoon.
Release week, as it actually goes
Nobody sets out to run a wine club from a shared file. It happens because the first release had forty members and a single tier, and then it had six hundred members, two tiers, a pickup list and nineteen shipping states.
Members reply to the release email asking to skip this one, to hold until October, to add two magnums, or to swap the card on file. Those replies get typed into a workbook by hand on the morning of the pick, by whoever is free.
What it costsAbout $2,900 a release in reshipped and refused casesThe declines show up when the bank file lands, three days after the pack line closed. By then the case is taped, the label is on it, and someone has to cut it open and put the bottles back on the rack.
What it costsAround 11 percent of club cards decline on the first passVolume caps, permit renewal dates and the states that take no direct shipment at all live on a printed sheet taped inside the office door. When that person is at a trade tasting, the case ships anyway.
What it costsA refused case plus a $148 carrier return, every single timeThe pickup list and the ship list drift apart between the last club event and the release. Cases go out to people who were planning to drive over, and the tasting room spends the following week apologizing on the phone.
What it costs31 tasting room hours a release spent on correctionsHow a release runs
The same order every time, whether you are shipping 180 cases or 1,800. Each step closes before the next one opens, so nothing gets picked from a sheet that changed an hour ago.
Set the tier rules once: three bottles for Cellar Circle, six for Founders, a double allocation for anyone past ten years. CellarShip rebuilds the list every release and flags the members whose tier or address changed since the last one.
Under an hour for most clubsMembers get one link to hold, skip, change quantities, move to pickup or update a card, with a cutoff date you choose. Every answer writes straight onto the release board instead of piling up in a mailbox.
Members answer on their own timeEvery address runs against volume caps, permit status and the states that accept no direct wine shipment. Anything that fails is held back with the reason written in a sentence you can read out loud to the member.
47 shipping states maintainedPick lists print in pack order, labels print with adult signature already set, and the manifest goes to the carrier as a single file. The truck leaves with paperwork that matches the cases on the dock.
Same day handoff
What the release desk covers
Written for wineries that pack their own cases, answer their own club phone and know exactly which member always asks for the Petite Sirah instead.
Tier rules are set once and applied to every release: three bottles at Cellar Circle, six at Founders, a doubled allocation for members past their tenth year. Substitutions and library adds sit on the same screen instead of a side note.
Members hold a shipment, skip a release or switch to pickup from a single link, with a cutoff date you set from the release screen. Every change writes onto the pick list right away, so the pack line never works from a sheet that expired last night.
Each address is checked against volume limits, permit status and the states that refuse direct wine shipments outright. Blocked orders wait in a queue with the reason and the fix attached, rather than failing quietly at the carrier counter.
Labels print in pack order with adult signature required and the service level matched to the forecast for that route. A weather hold moves an entire batch to the following Monday without rebuilding the run.
Declines are worked three business days ahead of the run, and members get a self service link to replace the card themselves. You walk onto the pack floor already knowing which cases are paid for.
Every member record shows the last four releases: what shipped, what was held, what was refunded and who called about it. The person at the tasting bar answers the question without walking back to the office computer.
What changes by the second release
Averages taken from 74 clubs that shipped at least two releases on CellarShip during 2025, measured against the release they ran the year before.
The hold list, the skip list and the pickup switches all land on one board, so nobody rebuilds the workbook by hand the night before the pick.
Cards are retried three business days before the run and members can replace their own card, so failures are settled before a case is taped shut.
Addresses that fail a state check never reach the carrier, and pickup members stop receiving cases they were planning to collect in person.
Pick lists, labels and the manifest print from the same release record, so the driver takes paperwork that already matches the pallet.
From the cellar door
Small production wineries in three regions, each running a club between 400 and 1,600 members.
Our spring release used to take two of us three full days, mostly reading email and typing holds into a workbook. This April I built the allocation on Monday, the hold window closed Thursday, and we handed 640 cases to the driver on Friday with nothing to redo. What surprised me was how quiet the phone got.
We ship to nineteen states and I was the only person who knew which ones were trouble. In one release CellarShip caught eleven addresses that would have gone out and come straight back, and it told me why in a sentence I could read to the member. That alone covered the year.
The card retry window is the piece I would fight to keep. We used to cut open taped cases because a decline landed after the pack was finished, and now every decline is settled before anyone touches a bottle. First pass approval went from the high eighties to ninety seven percent.
Plans
No per shipment fee, no percentage of the release, no charge for the fourth person you want looking at the board.
Up to 350 members
$59 per month
For a single label running two or three releases a year with one pack day each.
Up to 1,500 members
$139 per month
The plan most wineries land on: four releases a year, a real pickup crowd and shipping across a dozen or more states.
Up to 6,000 members
$289 per month
For estates shipping two or more labels, or a second bonded entity, out of the same building.
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars, with no setup fee and no annual contract. Cancel at any time from the account screen and keep exporting your club data for thirty days afterward.
Questions we get on the first call
If your question is not here, write to us and you will get a person, not a form letter.
Three plans, all billed monthly in US dollars: Small Club at $59 per month, Estate at $139 per month and Multi Label at $289 per month. The plan you need is decided by member count and by how many labels you ship under, not by how many releases you run. Moving up a plan takes effect on the next invoice and the change is never backdated against you. There is no setup fee and no annual contract to sign.
Most wineries run their first release with us within two weeks of sending a member export. Day one is the import: members, tiers, addresses, payment tokens and pickup preferences. Day two is your allocation logic, which usually takes a working session of about ninety minutes. We ask that you run one full release with us watching before you retire the old workbook.
Member records sit on US hosted infrastructure and are visible only to the staff accounts you create. We do not sell, rent or share your club list, and we never market anything to your members. Card details stay with your payment processor as tokens, so full card numbers are never stored in CellarShip. You can export the entire club to CSV whenever you want, without asking us first.
CellarShip exports a release summary that maps to the accounts your bookkeeper already uses, and it imports member lists from the common winery point of sale formats. Labels are produced for the parcel carriers that handle wine, using your own account numbers and your negotiated rates. If your till is something local or homegrown, the CSV import covers it and we map the columns with you during onboarding. We do not try to replace the register in the tasting room.
You can cancel from the account screen at any time and the plan stops at the end of the month you have already paid for. Your records stay available for export for thirty days after that, as CSV and as a full archive file. There is no cancellation fee and nobody will ask you to sit through a retention call. If you come back for the next vintage, that archive restores in one step.
No, and we would rather say so plainly. CellarShip checks every shipment against volume caps, permit status and the states that do not accept direct wine shipments, then holds back the ones that fail before they reach a carrier. Filing your returns and renewing your permits stays with you or with the compliance firm you already pay, and we export the shipment data those filings need. Wineries who work with a filing partner keep that partner, and the export drops into their process without retyping.
Cellar & Club
Nine reports on the part of the winery year that nobody photographs: the permit file, the billing run, the pack line, and the box that came back. Written from release weeks spent in tasting rooms across six states.
Talk to us about your next release
Tell us the member count, the tiers and the states you ship to, and we will walk you through the release board with your own numbers loaded, not a made up estate with tidy data. Thirty minutes, screen shared, no slides.
Nothing here goes to a mailing list, and there is no sequence of follow up emails waiting for you. Prefer plain email? Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and mention your release date.
Written and maintained by Jimenez Julien. He builds narrow software for trades that run on paperwork, and he spent two years sitting in cellars during release week before writing a line of CellarShip. Read more on the author page, or write to him at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.
