Harvest and vintage: why wine planning runs on one crop a year

One crop, one chance

A brewery that runs short of a lager brews more. Its malt and hops keep for months. A batch takes a few weeks. A winery has no such option. Grapes ripen once a year, must be crushed within hours of picking and cannot be stored. Whatever comes in during harvest is the total amount of wine available until the next one.

So the real supply decision for wine is taken months or even years before the sales it serves. A demand forecast that misses in March cannot be fixed by an extra production run in April. It can only be fixed with stock already in the cellar, bought-in bulk wine or by allocating what exists.

What vintage means

The vintage is the year the grapes were harvested. For most quality wine it is printed on the label. Each vintage is a separate batch of product. Weather changes the crop's size and its character, so the 2025 Shiraz and the 2026 Shiraz are related but not identical. Customers, buyers and wine lists notice.

In India the harvest runs roughly from January to March, after a fruit pruning around September or October. That means an Indian winery knows the size of its new crop early in the calendar year, with the whole year's sales still ahead. The background is in our guide to India's wine regions.

The harvest bottleneck

Harvest is compressed into a few weeks. Fruit has to be picked at the right ripeness, moved to the winery cool and crushed fast. The limits are physical: press capacity, fermentation tanks, cooling and the cellar crew's hours. A winery with tanks full of fermenting red cannot take in the next truck of grapes, however good they are.

Many wineries buy part or all of their fruit from contract growers. Contracts commonly set a price per kilogram or tonne with quality terms around sugar, condition and variety. The final volume depends on the weather and on what the growers actually deliver. A forecast that assumes the contracted tonnes will arrive in full is an optimistic forecast.

From tonnes to cases

Planners should be able to walk the chain from grapes to cases. A tonne of grapes usually yields somewhere around 600 to 750 litres of wine, depending on variety, style and how hard it is pressed. A premium white made from free-run juice yields less than a wine that takes heavier pressings. After that, losses to lees, racking, filtration and bottling take a few more percent.

Then comes time. A fresh white or rosé may be bottled within months. A red aged in barrel may not reach the market for two years. So at any moment a winery holds several vintages: one fermenting, one ageing, one being sold. Our guide to winery KPIs covers how that stock is measured.

Running out and running over

Two problems recur. The first is running out. A vintage sells faster than planned and the next is not ready. Options include an earlier release of the next vintage, if the wine is ready, or tighter allocation to channels. Silently swapping vintages on a shelf without updating labels and listings is not an option.

The second is running over. Fresh styles do not improve in the cellar. A white wine that was lovely at one year old is harder to sell at three. Ageing reds can wait, but they tie up cash and tank space while they do. Overstock in wine is never only a storage cost. It is a quality clock.

Questions a planner should ask the winery

• What tonnage is contracted for each variety? What arrived last year against contract?
• What is the expected litres per tonne for each wine? What were actual losses?
• When will each vintage be ready to bottle and to release?
• Which wines can carry over to the next vintage? Which lose value if they do?
• Where are the capacity limits at harvest: press, tanks or cooling?

These questions sound obvious, yet in many companies the planner and the winemaker work from different spreadsheets and different calendars. The demand plan runs on financial years while the cellar runs on vintages. Getting the two teams into one room with a shared picture of the crop does more for forecast accuracy than another model run.