Palate-IQ®
Grow stronger wine club relationships and more valuable DTC sales.
Personalized wine intelligence that goes beyond purchase history. Palate-IQ learns what customers enjoy and uses those insights to provide recommendations that are relevant to their individual tastes. The result is greater confidence in exploring wines, deeper engagement with your winery, and more opportunities for meaningful purchases.
Request a demo.
Commercial outcomes
Strengthen the economic value of the winery and customer relationship
Education gives customers reasons to engage. More relevant recommendations, incremental purchase opportunities, replenishment, and retention are outcomes Palate-IQ is designed to support. Its opt-in cellar and consumption signals add context that transaction history alone may miss.
Encourage more confident purchases
Help members explore new varietals, reserve bottles, and additional bottles with palate-fit guidance. The next order feels like a good decision, not a guess.
Extend the relationship beyond the tasting room
Education, a personal cellar, and Open Tonight keep your brand useful between visits and shipments. That same post-visit path can open a natural membership conversation, not only a quiet inbox.
Recognize opportunities to retain and re-engage
Opt-in cellar and consumption signals show when bottles are stacking up, favorites are running low, or engagement is fading—so outreach fits the moment instead of pushing a refill onto an overstocked member.
Order history shows what left your shop. Palate-IQ shows what’s still at home, and what to do about it.
Why not just your DTC platform
Understand more than the purchase. Understand the wine experience.
Complements ecommerce and club systems. It does not replace them.
Ecommerce and club platforms provide valuable purchase, membership, and engagement information. Palate-IQ adds another perspective: what customers own, drink, enjoy, and may want next, including wines outside your winery. Together, these insights can support more relevant recommendations, better-timed outreach, and stronger customer relationships.
How it works
Grow membership. Grow the next order. Give them reasons to return.
Illustrative examples of journeys that already exist in the product. Acquisition after the pour, confidence before the cart, and habits that keep the relationship warm between shipments.
Illustrative journey · Visitor to club
Tasting room guest → branded education → membership opportunity
Couples leave without joining all the time. Palate-IQ keeps the pour useful afterward so membership can feel like the natural next step, not a cold follow-up. Your DTC team can see who stayed engaged.
At the tasting
Guests access a branded Palate-IQ experience (QR Code or link) without joining the club first.
After the visit
They keep the wines tasted, personalized education, and their own notes in your voice.
While exploring
They see which other wines from your winery they are likely to enjoy.
At the membership moment
A relevant club invitation offers continued access, exclusive wines, and personalized guidance. Signup and POS stay yours.
Post-visit education in your brand’s voice. The relationship continues after the pour.
Looking for this leave-behind in more depth? Tasting room engagement
Illustrative journey · Recommendation to purchase
Short guidance → deeper analysis → purchase opportunity
Turn personalized recommendations into purchase opportunities. Palate-IQ helps customers understand why a wine matches their preferences, then connects them directly to your winery's shopping cart. This creates opportunities to introduce unfamiliar varietals, reserve wines, and additional bottles with greater confidence.
Confidence before the next bottle · then your storefront
Habit loop · Why they return
Open Tonight → enjoy & log → replenishment relevance
Once eligible bottles are in My Cellar, drink-window suggestions and meal pairings make the cellar useful mid-week without constant winery nudges. When members open and note what they enjoyed, your team sees clearer signals for refill and follow-up.
Open Tonight after eligible bottles exist in My Cellar
Meal pairings that keep the cellar useful
Also includes
- Wine details
- Their palate by varietal
- Wine & food pairings
- Compare bottles
- Explore appellations & grapes
- Critics who match their palate
For the winery
Spot the opportunity. Act while the relationship is warm.
Opt-in visibility into a member’s personal cellar, including wines beyond your winery, sits beside your cart and club analytics. It does not replace them.
Illustrative example
Replenishment outreach from cellar & consumption signals
- Opportunity: A club member owns several Cabernets and recently logged consuming a favorite. Holdings are running low.
- Suggested move: Offer a refill of that bottle, a similar allocation, or a recommended collection grounded in palate. Not last order alone.
- Next action: Club or tasting-room outreach while the relationship is still warm. Act before silence turns into cancel.
Supporting intelligence
Competitive set, regions and styles, consumption history, tasting notes, palate preferences, drinking windows, For You highlights, and visit signals where available.
Operator Insights · act while the relationship is warm
Holdings context order history never shows
Competitive set and styles for cross-sell confidence
Will members use it?
Built for how club members actually start and come back
Adoption isn’t a feature checklist. It’s whether the experience earns a place in their week.
Easy to start
Members begin with a branded link, QR Code, partner embed, or sign-in. On the reference storefront, “Will I Like It?” requires sign-in.
Useful before a palate history
Varietal and appellation education helps right away—before members have rated many bottles.
Cellar value that compounds
Members add or import bottles, or sync purchases from the connected partner storefront only. That builds the cellar Open Tonight and pairing can use.
Reasons to return
Open Tonight and pairing become useful after eligible bottles exist in My Cellar. “Will I Like It?” sharpens as members rate wines. Intelligence is strongest for engaged members.
How it fits
Alongside the stack you already run
Works alongside your existing ecommerce and wine club platform. Not a replacement. We assess integration together before implementation so members still see your winery.
Available now
Branded member education, personal cellar, Open Tonight, “Will I Like It?”, and opt-in winery intelligence views.
With your stack
Palate-IQ is a hosted web application, a member experience that runs in the cloud. There is nothing to install on your side. It can stand alone or sit inside your existing website. It works beside your shop, wine club tools, and analytics. You keep catalog, cart, and checkout.
We scope together
Timeline, catalog and commerce connection, data-sharing preferences, and which brands to start with. Assessed on the fit conversation.
Member data and winery visibility: Learn how enabling and disabling share categories, designated winery or winery-group access, store browsing vs Insights sharing, and how Stop sharing works in Palate-IQ. Member Data & Winery Visibility. Platform-specific connection steps are scoped on the fit call, not assumed from a public matrix.
The story behind Palate-IQ
It started with a simple question: Will I like it?
As a wine collector, founder Jim Lavine wanted to explore unfamiliar varietals and regions with confidence. Reviews and recommendations were helpful, but they couldn't tell him whether a wine suited his own palate.
Drawing on more than two decades of experience building software and data platforms, he created Palate-IQ to help people discover wines they're likely to enjoy, and recognize those they may not.
Today, that same personalized understanding helps wineries make more relevant recommendations and build stronger customer relationships beyond the purchase.
What to do next
Get started
A complementary intelligence layer beside your commerce stack. Demoed with a reference storefront integration. See how cellar insight, education, and confidence tools sit beside real ecommerce and club systems.
Request a 20-Minute Demo
Send a short request about club and DTC goals. We’ll follow up to arrange a time.
Request a 20-Minute DemoExplore the reference storefront
See how Palate-IQ sits beside real commerce in a sample storefront. It does not imply a winery endorsement.
Explore the reference storefrontDiscuss fit
Align on how it connects to your site, stand-alone or embed, before any implementation.
Start the fit check
Evaluate Palate-IQ with a focused winery pilot
Interested wineries can work with us to scope a limited evaluation built around their DTC goals, customer audience, and existing systems. Together we’ll agree on which experiences to test and how to assess adoption, member engagement, recommendation activity, and possible purchase opportunities. The goal is to learn whether personalized wine intelligence creates measurable value before considering a broader rollout.
FAQ
Common questions from tasting room, club, and DTC leads.
How it fits your winery
What are we buying?
Palate-IQ is a hosted web application, a member experience that runs in the cloud. There is nothing to install on your side. It can stand alone or sit inside your existing website. It works beside your shop, wine club tools, and analytics. You keep catalog, cart, and checkout. On the fit call we scope branding, connection, and which brands to start with.
How is this different from Commerce7, WineDirect, or our club platform?
Your existing DTC platform may already support customer profiles, marketing, personalization, and upselling. Palate-IQ complements those capabilities with opt-in information about personal cellars, consumption, tasting experiences, and palate preferences—including wines from other producers. This can give winery teams additional context for relevant recommendations. Palate-IQ is not a replacement for your ecommerce, club, or checkout system.
Does Palate-IQ replace our ecommerce or POS?
No. You own catalog, cart, payment, and compliance. Palate-IQ is a complementary intelligence layer for cellar insight, education, and confidence tools, and can hand add-to-cart intent back to your storefront when embedded.
Does it work with our existing website or club platform?
Yes. Keep your current site, club platform, and checkout. Palate-IQ connects stand-alone or embeds on your site with single sign-on so members stay in your brand journey. On the fit call we assess how it connects to your stack before any implementation.
Members and recommendations
Will our members actually use it?
Palate-IQ gives members practical reasons to return: discovering wines they'll enjoy, choosing what to open tonight, and finding the right pairing for dinner. The experience becomes more personalized as members explore, rate, and enjoy wines. Actual adoption is something we recommend measuring through member activation and repeat engagement during a winery pilot.
How do members get started?
Members can access Palate-IQ through a winery-branded link, QR Code, or embedded experience. Wine education is available immediately. Members can build their cellar by adding or importing bottles, or through supported storefront integrations. Personalized recommendations improve as they rate wines, while cellar-based features become useful once bottles are added.
What does “Will I Like It?” need to work well?
“Will I Like It?” uses a member’s palate history from tasted and rated bottles. Typically enough examples of a varietal in My Cellar. Education still helps without that history; Open Tonight helps once eligible bottles are in My Cellar. WILI gets sharper as members engage.
Does this help us gain members?
Illustratively: after a tasting-room visit, branded access (for example a QR Code or invite) can open education and a personal cellar so guests stay engaged digitally. That post-visit relationship is a natural path toward a club invite. Club signup and POS stay yours. Palate-IQ strengthens the between-visit layer; it does not replace your acquisition tooling.
How does this help retention and incremental purchasing?
Members get education and confidence between visits. You see opt-in personal cellar and drink-through signals so you can recommend, replenish, and reach out before cancel. That supports retention, bottle mix, and try/buy decisions without replacing your storefront.
Member data and winery groups
What information can a winery or winery group see?
Customers can opt in to share personal wine information held in Palate-IQ with one designated winery or winery group. They choose any combination of cellar wines, activity logs, tasting notes, and palate preferences. Authorized operators may then access only the categories enabled. Purchase and order history in the winery’s own commerce, POS, club, or CRM tools is separate and is not controlled by these Palate-IQ preferences. Enabling additional store browsing does not, by itself, grant unrelated wineries access to that Palate-IQ information. Learn about Member Data & Winery Visibility.
Can customers revoke winery access? What happens to exported information?
Yes. A customer can stop sharing or turn off categories in Palate-IQ under User Preferences → Share with winery. That prevents further access through Palate-IQ once effective, but it cannot automatically recall copies previously exported or downloaded by authorized operators. Those copies remain subject to applicable legal and contractual obligations. Learn more.
Who owns member data?
Members control what personal wine information Palate-IQ may share with their designated winery partner. Palate-IQ processes cellar, palate, and engagement signals needed to deliver the experience. We do not sell member data. Winery-native commerce records stay with the winery’s own systems. See Member Data & Winery Visibility and Privacy for marketing-site contact details.
What if we own more than one winery brand?
Yes. Each brand runs as its own store, so a multi-brand group can put Palate-IQ beside every label you want to connect. Your team can recommend bottles across those brands, use “Will I Like It?”, and show similar wines from elsewhere in the portfolio, so members discover more of what you own without each label feeling like a disconnected app. We decide which brands to start with on the fit call. Learn about winery groups.
Setup
How fast can we stand up stand-alone vs embed?
Stand-alone is typically fastest once branding and access are set. Embedding with single sign-on needs a bit more partner coordination (origins, frame allowlists, cart bridge if needed). We scope timeline on the fit call with your IT or ecommerce partner.
Can it look like our winery, not a third-party app?
Yes. Your theming carries your colors, banner, and product naming so the experience feels like an extension of your tasting room.
Which regions do you support?
Built for U.S. wineries and DTC generally. It is not tied to a single AVA or region.
Demo and a pilot
Who from our winery should join the first call?
Ideally tasting room or club leadership plus whoever owns the website or ecommerce stack. Marketing or DTC leads are welcome when brand continuity matters.
What is the reference storefront?
A live demo shop showing Palate-IQ beside real commerce. Prospects can explore the shop; operators with access log into Palate-IQ.
How would we evaluate impact without promising ROI?
When we talk, we can align on a small evaluation and which measures matter for your club. For example: invited members who activate, activated members returning monthly, extra orders per participating member, AOV vs comparable members, share buying a new varietal or wine, and cancel or renewal over a longer window. These are example measures, not a sold program or promised lift.
Talk with us
A short conversation to check fit and discuss how you’d evaluate impact for your club. We respond within one business day. This form is the only public way to reach us.
See Privacy for what we collect.
Message sent
Thanks. We’ll reply soon. Next step is usually a short call to check fit (tasting room / club goals, stand-alone vs embed, and who should join from your side).
For the winery