A website for a winery: wine pages, sales and rules

A winery site works when every wine has its own page with vintage, denomination, grape, alcohol, price and availability, and when checkout closes in three steps with age verified. The winery tells the story; the product page sells the bottle.

People buying wine online want a specific bottle or a gift. In the first case they compare vintage and price, in the second they look for gift boxes and shipping cost. Either way the page that decides is the product page: the home page matters less than it seems.

The pages a winery actually uses

The wine page: eight values nobody writes

• Vintage and denomination: DOC, DOCG, IGT or table wine, with the production area.
• Grape and percentages if it is a blend, alcohol by volume.
• Ageing: steel, wood, months in bottle.
• Allergens: sulphites above 10 mg/l, as Regulation EU 1169/2011, Annex II requires, together with Regulation EU 1308/2013.
• Ingredients and nutrition: since 8 December 2023 they are mandatory for wine too (Regulation EU 2021/2117), and a QR code to the electronic label is the usual route.
• Serving temperature and pairings: two lines, not a poem.
• Real availability: bottles in stock or «arriving», not a button that accepts impossible orders.
• Price including VAT and the shipping cost visible before the cart.

Minimum age: a notice is not a check

Decree Law 158/2012, converted into Law 189/2012, bans the sale of alcoholic drinks to anyone under 18. A notice asking «are you over 18?» is not a check: anyone clicks yes. The practical check moves to delivery, with an ID inspection: write it into the terms of sale and ask the carrier to apply it. The carrier must be able to refuse delivery to a minor.

Visits and tastings: a booking, not a phone call

The tasting page is the part of the site that brings people to the winery and bottles back home. It needs days, hours, length, minimum number, price per person, what is poured and how to arrive. A three-field booking is enough; prepayment only makes sense when seats are limited. Someone arriving by bike or with a child should find the answer before writing.

Distance selling: excise duty and borders

Wine is an excise product. Directive (EU) 2020/262, Articles 44-47, governs distance sales: anyone shipping to another Member State appoints a certified fiscal representative in the destination country and pays excise duty there, except for the simplifications some states grant small producers. In Italy the reference is Legislative Decree 504/1995. For a small winery the consequence is concrete: selling in Italy is one thing, selling in Germany another.

Outside the Union the rules change again: the United States runs a three-tier system that bans direct shipping in many states. Before opening the cart to a country, check three things: fiscal representative, a carrier that accepts alcohol, a label that meets local rules.

Structured data: Product, Offer and vintage

The JSON-LD uses Product for the bottle, with name, sku, gtin13 where it exists, brand and image; Offer for price, currency, availability and condition; additionalProperty for vintage and denomination, because schema.org has no field for wine. Do not invent AggregateRating without real reviews: it is the fastest way to lose structured data. The method is in how to add schema markup.

curl "https://ui.eneawork.it/api/blocks/creativetimofficial-ui/product-details-01" | jq '.block.title, .block.categories'

Blocks from the catalogue

Three records. Product Details 01 from Creative Tim is the page with an image carousel: the right space for the bottle, the label and the closure. Shopping Cart 01 is the cart to extend with age and shipping. Checkout 01 closes the order on a single page, which for a winery is the right call.

The limitation to state up front

The blocks are React and Tailwind: there is no stock system, no link to the excise register, no automatic VAT calculation per country. The catalogue covers the interface; logistics and tax sit outside. A cart promising Europe-wide shipping without a fiscal representative is a legal problem, not a technical detail. Previews are free, the full code sits in the Pro part.

Cost and timing

A winery site with ten wine pages and a cart sits in the low thousands of euro; the real cost is maintaining the vintages: every harvest changes pages, prices and availability. If the wine page cannot be edited by the person selling, the site is out of date by January. The full picture is in what a website costs.

For e-commerce in general read building an e-commerce site and blocks for e-commerce, for local commerce local e-commerce, for the platform WordPress, Wix or React components. If nobody finds the wine pages you need to get the site indexed by Google.