As harvest winds down, wineries start thinking about 2027 budgets, pricing, and channel plans. Those decisions depend on cost numbers, and for a lot of wineries those numbers are shaky.
Our 2026 State of Winery Health Report found that 43% of wineries set prices without knowing the margin on each wine. The wineries that do track profit per wine are more than twice as likely to be profitable.
Getting to that number is hard. Costs sit in QuickBooks, a few spreadsheets, and whatever the cellar team wrote down. Pulling them together takes so long that most wineries wait until year-end, when it’s too late to change anything. Emma Fladeboe, our head of enterprise sales, hears “accurate enough” more than any other phrase.
Most of the damage comes from learning what a case cost after the pricing and channel decisions are already made.
We asked Emma, winery accountant Zane Stevens, and Darioush CFO Trycel Alvarez-Pihl where costing goes wrong. InnoVint finance builds costing on top of the wine movements your team already records. As Trycel put it: “The winemaking team does all their work orders… and then I go in and do the costing. It doesn’t interfere in any way.”
Four takeaways from the conversation:
Don’t wait for year-end. Build costing into your monthly close so you can act on what you learn while it still matters.
Let cost follow the wine. Spreading labor and overhead evenly hides your real margins, so allocate based on where the work happened and update your standard costs every year.
Know your margin before you choose a channel, approve a discount, or commit to a blend. With blend trial costing, winemakers see what each blend version costs next to the quality decision.
Keep numbers you can defend. Banks and buyers will ask what your wine costs. Trycel’s year-end bulk roll forward went from a manual Excel build to a button click.
For the full discussion, including Trycel’s Costing Diagnostic Worksheet, read The Real Cost of a Case: 4 Costing Takeaways from Winery Finance Leaders