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July 2015 WINES&VINES 37 TECHNOLOGY Reasons for choosing wine production software At the risk of repetition from the previous ar- ticle (see "Choosing Vineyard Management Software" in the January 2015 issue of Wines & Vines), selecting your software provider is akin to choosing your life partner. The process is very personal in that you will be working with the company you choose for a very long time, and with important decisions that can affect the ease of how you do business. At least one of the software companies mentioned in this article has been serving some of their cli- ents for more than 30 years. There must be a comfort level that the company you choose can provide support and service when a computer crashes in the middle of harvest, or if a soft- ware glitch brings down your system. These are horrific scenarios, but ones you need to think about before they happen. To the smaller wineries that are using Excel spreadsheets as their primary digital record keeping methods—or know enough to have a rudimentary Access database—you are advised to start with any one of these packages to save yourself grief and expense in the long run. The importance of this type of software can elude some who are new to the industry, where the web of complexity is often not realized until too late. Software keeps the business under control with little effort beyond daily recordkeeping. The software stores critical data that can be recalled when needed (such as when a regulator visits and asks you to justify the number of bottles you sold with a label, plus all the other places that varietal was sold during the past two years). Situations like this make you understand the cost-benefit analysis of making a mistake in your person- ally created software Amphora publishes an introductory soft- ware package that can get you started if the scale of your business does not demand one of the more costly alternatives. The most impor- tant action is to begin the process of data col- lection so that it is preserved and in searchable form. As your needs progress, you can expand to more powerful programs that have more error protections and audit controls. Whether your entry to this industry is at the level of a large home winemaker or a corpo- rate-level entity, consider one of these packages to guide your business so you don't go afoul of reporting requirements. For example: Do you understand the calculations necessary for ame- lioration, chapitalization and sweetening wine such that you are in compliance with the TTB on filing your 5120.17 (old 702) report? Each of these changes the volume of the wine in varying degrees. If you are performing any of these functions at your winery, you need to know exactly how and where to plug numbers to get the proper number of gallons produced. If the program you are using doesn't perform such calculations for you, your records could be out of compliance. The major companies Seven companies have commercial software for wine production that I have reviewed for this article. All of the companies continue to develop new functions, reports and user-inter- face improvements. The industry has a robust set of software choices from which to choose. At the time of the vineyard management software article printed in January, only two companies were fully integrated from vineyard to bottle: IVIS Software and AMS. Other wine- production companies do have vineyard models, but they are written more from the winery per- spective than from the true operation of the vineyard. Those companies with integrated modules include Amphora, Vintners Advantage, Vintegrate and Orion. Wine production is the most complex part of the wine industry—and the place where you must get it right. This software type is the basis of your compliance with regulatory agencies, and it is the link between receiving the fruit and handing a finished bottle to sales representatives. If you can only afford one industry-specific package, this is the one to purchase first. To make sense out of this complex array of software companies, and to try to simplify the comparison of the products, the table "What Leading Vendors Offer" (page 38) details the functions each offering can perform as well as its versatility. OPERATING SYSTEM AND SYSTEM ACCESS Most of the available operating systems are Windows-based and operate in a client/server arrangement. Amphora is the only one that indicates it is compliant with Mac OS X or later. Vintners Advantage offers access to Mac Work Station, but it must be through Vintners Ad- vantage cloud-based software. The newest trends for enterprise software are cloud-based systems and ones accessed by tablets and smartphones. IVIS, Vintegrate, Orion and Breckenridge have or will soon have all three. Vintners Advantage has cloud access only. Winemakers Database's new Scion release, com- ing later this year, will contain these features. KEY POINTS Having tested many varieties of winery production software over the years, the author looked again at the major products for this comprehensive review of winery-specific solutions. When it's time to upgrade from Excel spreadsheets to more cellar-specific software, the products described here keep a winery business under control with little effort over and above daily record keeping. An explosion of new functionality—and the coming trend of cloud-based software— means that winery software is better than ever and easier to use. The importance of this type of software can elude some who are new to the industry. Its web of complexity is not realized until too late. Amphora is the only software compatible with Mac OS X.