Paper, Mergers and Missing Records: What We Learned Taking Cellarhand to Market

While building our launch plan, we set out to create a clean list of the wineries in British Columbia in our customer relationship management system, or CRM, the software we use to keep track of the wineries and people we work with. We knew our industry sees a lot of mergers, acquisitions and changes of ownership, but until we got into the details of building our first outreach list, we didn't realize how much constant motion there actually was. We quickly saw that a list we built today could be out of date by next week.

The purpose of the list was to find the first wineries to invite to Early Access, which offers free use of Cellarhand until launch and a founding discount for wineries that sign up early. The hardest part was mapping parent and child relationships. Many wineries we first listed as independent turned out to belong to a parent company, sometimes alongside several sibling wineries. The people were just as interconnected, with winemakers working across more than one label and consultants of many kinds supporting several wineries at once. Production volumes are also rarely public, so estimating each winery's size took real digging to make sure we were reaching out to the wineries we're built to serve.

Keeping that picture current by hand quickly proved impossible. So we used an AI assistant to set up a weekly scheduled search of public sources that picks up new owners, mergers, new labels and people changing roles. It flags what has changed, and our team reviews each update before it goes into our CRM. We want technology to make running our own company simpler, which is exactly what we hope Cellarhand can do for wineries, and it would be hard to ask wineries to trust a better system if we weren't willing to use one ourselves.

Watching that much change raised a bigger question for us: what happens to a winery's history when it's sold? A sale transfers the land, the equipment, the inventory and the brand. Much of a winery's production history, though, is tacit knowledge: what happened to each lot, why decisions were made, and what was added, moved or tasted along the way. That knowledge is held by the people who did the work and is rarely written down in full. When it lives in one person's memory or in notes only they can read, it's hard to see how it survives a handover.

It's a problem we've seen up close, and it's how Cellarhand began. In 2022, new excise taxes in Canada made accurate cellar records essential at our founder Paula Brunner's family winery. The winery tried commercial software, but onboarding dragged on, it was overly complex, and mistakes kept happening so they kept using paper. However, paper was often misplaced, damaged or incomplete which left their accountant struggling with tax filing. That challenge sparked the idea for a tool that was focused, radically simple and built for the way winemakers work. The project paused when the winery was sold. In 2025, Paula, a product engineer by trade, revived it and commissioned market research to evaluate the real need for a product like this. The research confirmed it.

The research also changed how we thought about competition. A lot of other winery software comes with modules, onboarding and pricing you have to contact sales to see. Our biggest competitor, though, is pen, paper and spreadsheets, which our research suggests around 63% of wineries still rely on, even though plenty of software is available.

That isn't hard to understand, because paper works. It survives wet cellars and long harvest days without Wi-Fi or a charger, and in our research interviews, winemakers described paper as their working memory for the day. Nothing is wrong with paper but what concerns us is long-term memory: notes get scattered, records go missing, and the history of a vintage can end up in binders nobody can search, or that leave with the person who wrote them. That's the gap Cellarhand is built to close, with software for the barrel rather than the boardroom that turns cellar work into records in seconds so the craft stays centre stage.

Cellarhand is built for small and mid-sized independent wineries, from family operations to established producers. We’ve focused on keeping it simple: a phone app the winemaker uses right at the tank or barrel, that works offline in the barrel room, and that lets a winery start with a single tank and build from there. We're also starting with a focused effort close to home in British Columbia, beginning with the Okanagan and Vancouver Island. Almost all of our beta wineries are in Canada, and our research found that adoption tends to happen through peers, networks and consultants, so we want to put real time into communities we know, cellars we can visit and relationships we can build in person.

That brings us back to the question every sale raises. When a winery changes hands, its history has to change hands too, from fruit intake and vessel moves to fermentation readings, additions, blends and bottling. As one winemaker told us after a Cellarhand demo, "Being able to hand off that information in a way that's readable for the next person - that's the big advantage." That's what Cellarhand is built to provide: one connected record from intake to bottle, captured as the work happens, with clear audit trails showing who entered what and when, so the history can stay with the wine.

Cellarhand launches in 2027 for wineries anywhere, with a focused start in British Columbia alongside our beta and Early Access wineries. If you run or work with a small winery and the clipboard-and-spreadsheet routine sounds familiar, we'd love to show you how Cellarhand works in a real cellar. You can sign up for Early Access at cellarhand.com or reach us at hello@cellarhand.com.

Let's Make Wine!