Estate Crush Winery: Crushing Grapes and Competition
Lodi, CA - Estate Crush Winery is making over 150 wines in an 18,000 sq.ft. facility, running tasting tours, and offering custom batches.
If you think that sounds overwhelming, you'd be right. Keeping things in line isn't easy for Estate Crush—take a look at their daily schedule.
- Receive, weigh, and press the fruit.
- Refine the juice and ferment.
- Bottle and preserve it.
Keep in mind, each of those steps has 8-10 stages to it -- that's a lot.
It’s a lengthy process, but it takes more than just time: it takes dedication, passion, and tremendous self-restraint.
"Each of those steps has a lot of moving parts and they all need to be tracked. At first, we thought Excel would be perfect, but after a few months it became pretty obvious that we need something a lot more powerful."
It was at this point that they signed up for Zoho Creator. Everything else came naturally after that.
"Zoho Creator is a relational database and it really allows the average person with just a little experience, to pick, drop, and drag anything you want in any order you want, to create a relationship between different things. We have nineteen different modules tracking our processes in Zoho Creator right now."
From managing the inventory and analyzing each stage the wine goes through, to collecting and processing work orders, Estate Crush manages multiple modules through a single application.
They use Zoho Creator much more than anticipated, even going so far as to extract data from their inventory to generate reports for their customers. When you’re in the business of making fine wines, it pays to engage and answer questions about pH, residual sugar, and total acidity before clients even ask.
"We were able to set up the Zoho Creator software so that when we touch a wine, it automatically sends an email to our client base and tells them what we did to it. Nobody does that."
When it comes to the numbers, their clients are as informed as the managers. Thanks to the cloud, as the inventory is updated, so are their reports.
"As our Zoho Creator database has grown, so has our business. Right now, we are at about 300 tons of wine. We can do more and Zoho Creator will be the basis for it."
That’s our mission here at Zoho Creator: We’re looking to help businesses like Estate Crush grow their business and maximize their potential.
"It's inexpensive, very easy, and the support’s great. You can grow quickly, you can grow as fast as you want, and as big as you can imagine. Zoho Creator’s been just a perfect partner for us."
Cheers!
Thanks:Bob Colarossi and Nick Sikeotis,Managing partners, Estate Crush.