Questions and answers
Winery tasting events: questions, answered
bindro sells tasting-room bookings for a winery: the day is cut into arrival slots, each slot holds its own seats per flight, and a taster picks a time, confirms the party is 21 or over and pays on one phone-sized page. A booker under 21 is refused before payment, a membership number typed at checkout is verified against the winery's own roster before a member price is given, bottles and boards ride along as add-ons, and the door scans a QR code with no signal at all. Money reaches the winery two days after the last slot of the event it was sold under, never before.
Reviewed: 2026-08-09
What wineries ask
How do wineries take tasting reservations?
You cut each opening day into arrival slots and give every slot its own stock of seats per flight. A taster picks a date, sees which times still have seats, chooses one, answers the questions this vertical already asks — party size, the 21-and-over confirmation, the booker's date of birth, dietary needs, access needs and a membership number if they have one — and pays. Seats are held under a row lock while they pay, so two people cannot take the last seat at three o'clock, and the seat is released again if they abandon the page.
How do I offer wine club member pricing on tastings?
You set a member price on the ticket type and add your members to the console roster; bindro does not run the club itself. A taster types their membership number at checkout, the server matches it against your organisation's roster inside the same transaction that takes the money, and a current member gets the member rate while everyone else pays the standard one. Dues, renewals, allocations and shipping stay in whatever runs your club today: there is no recurring charge in bindro, and buying a seat or a pass never adds anybody to the roster.
What is the best booking system for a cellar door?
The honest answer is that it depends on whether your problem is the tasting room or the club. If it is the room, bindro is configured for it out of the box: timed arrival slots, an under-21 booking refused before payment, member prices checked against your own roster, bottles as add-ons, walk-ups sold at the door on the same money path, and scanning that works when the barn has no signal. If it is club billing, allocations or shipping compliance, a winery DTC platform is the right tool and bindro is not a replacement for it.
Can I stop under-21s from booking a tasting?
Yes, for the person making the booking, and it is refused rather than merely asked. The booker gives their date of birth, and the rule is evaluated on the money path inside the confirm transaction: a booker under 21 gets an error anchored to the field, no order is created and no payment is taken. A date the system cannot parse is refused too, because a rule that garbage bypasses is not a rule. Everyone else in the party is covered by an attestation, which is why the door still checks ID.
Does bindro check ID at the cellar door?
A person checks the ID; bindro makes it impossible to admit someone in the console without saying you did. On the check-in page every taster carries an "ID checked" confirmation, and the action is refused without it — at an age-gated door, admitted and ID-seen have to be the same act. The confirmation is recorded against the scan rather than the order, so what you can show later is that this person was admitted at this time with ID seen. A scan sent through the door API records the same flag but does not refuse without it.
Can I sell bottles, glasses and cheese boards with a tasting booking?
Yes. Add-ons are a catalogue you publish against the tasting, each option with its own stock, and a taster picks them during checkout. They are priced and their stock is moved inside the same transaction that takes the seat, so a board that has run out cannot be oversold and the money is part of the order rather than a second sale. That also means the platform fee, the tax and any refund treat the bottle exactly as they treat the seat.
Does the cellar-door till take payment for bottles at the counter?
No, and this is the most important sentence on the page. The till page holds your bottle and food catalogue and records a sale at the price you set, for your own end-of-day numbers — the money never routes through bindro, so it does not appear in Money, does not reach the ledger, is not part of a payout and cannot be refunded here. Your card machine takes the payment. If you want a bottle charged by bindro, sell it as an add-on on the booking instead.
Can I take a walk-up booking at the door?
Yes, and unlike the till it is a real sale. The day-of page shows live availability per flight and per slot; starting a door sale takes a genuine hold on those seats and hands you into the ordinary checkout on your own device, so the price is derived the same way, the registration rules apply the same way, the card is captured the same way and the taster gets a credential that scans. There is deliberately no second money path for the door.
How does bindro handle sales tax on a tasting?
You set one rate on the event and the server applies it in the single money derivation that the quote and the confirmation share, so what the taster is charged is what the page showed them. Tax is itemised on the checkout summary rather than buried in the total, and on a refund it is reversed in its own tier — your proceeds first, then the tax, then the platform fee. bindro does not decide your rate for you and files nothing with any authority.
When does the money from a tasting reach my bank account?
Two days after the last session of the event the seat was sold under, and never before the tasting has happened. That is one payout per event rather than one per pour: if you publish a release weekend as a single event with a dozen slots, the payout is scheduled two days after the final slot ends, not two days after each one. Wineries sit in the low risk tier here, so no reserve is held back. Never being paid before delivery is what protects a taster who booked in good faith.
What happens if the tasting room or the barn has no signal?
The door keeps working. A device downloads a manifest for the session before you lose connectivity, scans against it with no network at all, and replays what it recorded when it reconnects. First scan wins, and anything that looks like a double admission is put in a conflict queue for a human rather than silently resolved. This is why the vertical is configured the way it is: a vineyard with one bar of signal at the top of the hill is the normal case, not the edge case.
Can I sell a club pass that covers a whole release weekend?
Yes. You publish a ticket type as a pass, and its holder is admitted at every session of that event — including on an offline door list, because the pass is written onto every covered session's manifest. Two things to size for: how many passes you sell is bounded by the pass tier's own stock, and a pass consumes no seat in the slots it admits at, so a room with a licensed capacity has to leave room for the pass holders you expect on top of the seats you sell.
Can I sell winery gift cards?
Yes. A gift card is bought against your winery rather than against one tasting, and it is carried as a liability until it is redeemed rather than counted as revenue on the day it was sold — which is the correct treatment and the reason the number in your reports is trustworthy. At checkout a taster enters the code, the value is applied as a tender line on the order, and the balance is drawn down inside the same transaction that takes the booking.
What does it cost a winery to take a tasting booking?
Two and a half per cent plus ninety-nine cents on a paid booking, and nothing else. No monthly fee, no setup fee, no contract and no charge at all for a free event — a club-member walk-through you charge nothing for costs you nothing. The fee is computed once on the order rather than once per seat, so a table booked together pays the fixed part once, whether those seats were sold on your page, embedded in your own site or rung up as a walk-up at the door. You can choose whether you absorb the fee or the taster pays it.
Can I run a members-only tasting?
Not as an enforced rule, and this is worth being blunt about. Membership sets a PRICE here, not a permission: once a tasting is on sale, anybody who has the link can book it at the standard price, and there is no invitation-only listing, no access code and no eligibility rule you can point at the roster. What wineries do in practice is publish the release as its own event, send the link to members only, and have the door turn away anybody who should not be there.
Can I take a deposit for a winemaker dinner and the balance later?
No. This vertical does not resolve instalments, so a dinner seat is charged in full when it is booked or it is not sold: there is no deposit, no scheduled second charge and no card kept on file for the balance. If the full price is too much to ask up front, the usual answers are a smaller ticket type for an earlier sitting, a promo code for the people you want to reward, or a gift card the guest buys in advance and redeems against the dinner.
How should I handle a party of ten who want to book together?
As one booking. The form asks how many guests are coming and takes up to twelve on a single card payment, which covers almost every private party a tasting room sees. What you cannot do is set a group rate or collect each guest's details separately — group registration is not enabled for wineries, so a coach party is either the ordinary price times the number of seats, or an arrangement you make with the operator away from the platform.
Can I comp a seat for a journalist or a trade visit?
Yes. A comp seat takes inventory and scans at the door exactly like a paid one, so your capacity numbers stay honest and the visitor gets a credential that works. What it does not do is write revenue lines, which means comps are separated from sales in every report rather than quietly inflating a good weekend. Use them for trade, press and the winemaker's own guests instead of a hundred per cent discount code.
Can I put the tasting booking form on my own winery website?
Yes. You can send people to your bindro page, or embed the checkout in the site you already have so the taster never appears to leave it. Either way the same slots, the same age rule, the same member price and the same seat locks apply, because there is one booking path underneath both. The pages work with scripting switched off, which matters more than it sounds in a farm shop on a phone with one bar.
What tasters ask
Do I have to book a tasting in advance, or can I just turn up?
Book if you can. Seats are sold per arrival time and a popular Saturday slot genuinely sells out, at which point the page says fully booked and there is no waiting list to join — nobody will call you if someone cancels. If you do arrive without a booking, many wineries can sell you a seat at the door from whatever is still free in the next slot, but that depends on the day rather than on anything the booking page can promise you.
Do I need to bring ID to a tasting?
Yes, bring photo ID for every person tasting, even if you all confirmed your ages when booking. The box you tick at checkout is a declaration, not a check: the winery is required to see physical ID on arrival, and staff confirm they have seen it as part of admitting you. Someone who cannot produce ID can be refused entry, and a refusal at the door is a matter for the winery — the booking system will not automatically refund a seat that was not used.
What happens if I am late for my tasting slot?
Call the winery. Your booking is for a specific arrival time and the software does not release your seat when you are late, but it also cannot move you to a later slot: there are no date or time changes here, so whether a late party is still poured for is the winery's decision rather than an automatic one. Your code stays valid until somebody scans it, and once it has been scanned it does not admit you a second time.
Can I bring a friend who is not drinking?
Ask the winery before you book. The form counts tasters rather than drinkers, and the confirmation you tick says every taster is 21 or over — so a non-drinking adult is simply another taster, while anybody under 21 is something the winery has to agree to in advance and cannot be waved through by the booking form. Tell them at the same time about anything else that changes the visit, like a driver who wants pours poured into a take-home sample.
Can I get a refund if I cannot come to my tasting?
Ask the winery, because the refund policy is theirs rather than the platform's. What is true everywhere is the mechanism: a refund returns money to the card that paid, in full or in part, and it does not put your seat back on sale for somebody else. There is no self-service cancel button that reopens the slot, so the earlier you tell them, the more likely they are to be able to fill the space by hand.
Can I give my tasting seat to a friend if I cannot use it?
Not through bindro. Tasting bookings cannot be transferred to somebody else and cannot be moved to another date: the winery would have to refund you and let your friend book again from whatever is still on sale. If you are buying for somebody else in the first place, a gift card is the instrument that is designed to change hands — it is bought against the winery and redeemed by whoever holds the code.
How do I tell the winery about an allergy or an access requirement?
Both are questions on the booking form: dietary requirements and allergies per guest, and a free-text box for access needs such as step-free routes, seating or an assistance animal. Both answers are classed as health information, which means they are encrypted, kept out of analytics exports and never passed into an AI assistant. They reach the people running your tasting and nobody else. If something is critical, telephone as well — a form cannot confirm that a kitchen can guarantee it.
Is my membership number safe to type into the booking form?
Yes, and the winery cannot read it back afterwards. Only a one-way hash of the reference is stored, so the check is a comparison rather than a lookup and the roster cannot be browsed or guessed at by trying prefixes. If the number is not current you see one general message rather than being told whether it was unknown, lapsed or revoked — a per-reason error would turn the form into a way of testing which membership numbers exist.
What does bindro NOT do for a winery?
A capability this vertical does not declare is refused by the engine rather than quietly missing, so it is listed here rather than left to be discovered.
- bindro does not run your wine club. There is no recurring charge anywhere in the product: no dues, no renewal, no club sign-up, no allocation and no shipping. Member pricing is a check made at checkout against a roster you type into the console by hand, one member at a time, with no CSV import — and nothing adds a buyer to it, not even buying a club pass. Whatever bills and ships your club today keeps doing it.
- A member price is not a members-only door. The roster decides what a taster PAYS, never whether they may book: once a tasting is on sale, anyone with the link can take a seat at the non-member price, and there is no invitation-only listing, no access code and no rule you can point at a membership number. A club-only release is protected by who you send the link to and by the person on the door, not by the software.
- The till writes bottle and food sales down; it does not take the money, and there is no way to record a seat paid for in cash. A counter sale rung up on the POS page is recorded at the price you set for your own end-of-day numbers, and that money never enters the platform ledger, never reaches a payout and cannot be refunded here. A walk-up seat sold at the door is a real card sale on the ordinary checkout, but crediting a winery for cash the platform never held would pay you for the same seat twice, so bindro refuses to pretend. Bottles a taster adds to a booking ARE charged by bindro, because an add-on is part of the order.
- No deposits and no payment plans. A winemaker dinner is charged in full at the moment of booking or not at all: this vertical does not resolve instalments, so there is no deposit-now-balance-later, no scheduled second charge and no card held for the rest. The nearest instrument is a gift card, and a gift card is something a guest chooses to buy rather than something you can bill them for.
- No waiting list, and a refunded seat does not come back on sale. When a slot fills the page says fully booked and stops: nobody joins a list and nobody is emailed when a seat frees up. Refunding a booking returns the money and leaves the seat counted as sold, so if you want one more couple at two o'clock, raise that slot's capacity by one rather than waiting for a cancellation to reopen it.
- No transfers and no date changes. A taster who cannot come on Saturday cannot hand the seat to a friend and cannot move it to Sunday — this vertical resolves neither ticket transfer nor deferral, and there is no credit note to issue. The only lever is a refund, after which they book again at whatever is still on sale. A gift card is the giftable instrument; a tasting seat is not.
- No group product and no invoicing on terms. A booking takes up to twelve guests on one card payment and that is the whole of it: there is no group rate to set, no roster for a coach party to fill in guest by guest, and no purchase order or invoice. A tour operator or a corporate visit is either an ordinary booking at the ordinary price or an arrangement you make with them off the platform.
- A club pass takes no seat in the slot it admits at. A pass tier is bounded only by its own stock, and its holder is admitted at every session of the event it covers while consuming none of those slots' seats. A tasting room with a licence-limited capacity therefore has to size its slots for the pass holders it expects as well as for the seats it sells; nothing warns the door that a busy slot is fuller than the screen says.
What else should I read?
Winery tasting events: the overview
Timed tasting bookings, member prices and a door that works with no signal.
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