Marshall Stuart Fine Wines

The problem

A winery sells a feeling before it sells a bottle, and the old site couldn’t deliver one. It ran on a do-it-yourself site builder that had become a dinosaur: dated, hard to grow, and charging every month for the privilege. Private events and large groups need a signed contract before the date is locked in. And the wine club team spent hours on routine admin instead of with members.

What changed

• A ground-up rebuild the winery owns. A custom 25-page site on hosting that’s both highly secure and free. No site-builder subscription, no template, no monthly bill just to stay online.
• A site that sells the experience. A full-screen harvest video, big photography, and every one of their 23 wines with its own bottle photo, tasting notes, and a shop button.
• A wine club page that closes. All three membership tiers side by side, each with its own sign-up button.
• Event contracts signed on a phone. Staff fill in the event once and email the host a private link. The host reviews, initials, and e-signs in about five minutes, and the signed PDF lands in everyone’s inbox.
• Simon, an AI assistant that handles routine wine club and order tasks and drafts email replies for the manager to review.

Why it pays off

Every page leads to one of three places: buy a bottle, join the club, or come visit. Club members are recurring revenue, and the club page turns joining into a two-tap decision. A 12-article Journal keeps bringing in new visitors from Google long after each article is written. Event contracts now get signed on a phone in about five minutes, so bookings get locked in while the host is still excited. And with no site-builder fees, the winery keeps more of what the site earns.

Simon, the AI assistant

Simon is an AI operations assistant running on its own dedicated computer. It connects to the winery’s wine club and order system, and the wine club manager talks to it through a simple messaging app, the same way you’d text a coworker.

• Ask, and it’s done. Routine wine club and order tasks get handled on request, without logging into another screen.
• Drafts the replies. Member and customer emails come back as ready-to-send drafts for the manager to review.
• Plays it safe. Simon asks for confirmation before doing anything that can’t be undone.

Every hour the wine club manager isn’t spending on routine admin is an hour with members and guests, which is where club sign-ups and repeat orders come from. Simon doesn’t replace the manager. It makes the manager faster.

Everything I built

For anyone who wants the full picture, here’s the whole project. Open any section for the details.

The website: 25 pages built to sell wine

• Home: a full-screen harvest video, featured wines, the wine club pitch, the winery’s story over real vineyard footage, and an invitation to visit.
• Our Story: the founder’s real career timeline, from soil contractor to winemaker, and a gallery of 9 restored family archive photos.
• History: a researched, six-chapter history of Temecula Valley wine country.
• Wines: all 23 current wines with custom bottle photos, prices, vintages, and tasting notes, filterable by type, each with a shop button into the winery’s online store.
• Wine Club: three membership tiers, including a monthly club, with their real sign-up links.
• Visit: hours, address, map, tasting price, group reservation rules, and practical notes for families, food, and parking.
• Events: the tasting room’s live music calendar, plus a section for special event flyers that only appears when there’s one to show.
• Journal: a 12-article content library, each article answering a real question people search for and linking back to the wines.
• An age check on every page that asks for a full date of birth, following alcohol industry guidance, and remembers verified visitors.
• Hours, address, and phone kept in one place, so the pages, footer, and search engine data never disagree.
• Wines, events, and articles the winery can update without touching code.
• The old site’s addresses redirect to the new pages, so existing links and Google rankings keep working.

Private event contracts, signed on a phone

• Staff fill in the event once on a simple form and email the host a private link.
• The host reviews the event, initials each section, and signs with a finger or by typing, right on their phone, in about five minutes.
• The signed contract arrives as a branded PDF in the host’s inbox and the team’s, and the team’s copy comes with a to-do list for that event.
• Staff see every agreement in one place: waiting for a signature, signed, and the next event coming up.
• Every word of the contract lives in one place, so the signing page, the PDF, and the emails always match.
• Styled to match the winery’s brand, down to the wine-colored buttons.

Design, photography, and brand

• A look with the polish of a large luxury winery, rooted in the winery’s own story and imagery, not a template.
• The logo cleaned up from the supplied file, with a new version so it works on light backgrounds too.
• All 23 bottle photos cropped around each bottle and finished with a soft background blur so the label stays sharp, shrunk from about 2.4 MB to about 150 KB each.
• Faded family prints from the 1970s to the 1990s color-corrected and restored.
• Video backgrounds checked frame by frame so the text stays readable from the brightest frame to the darkest.
• The winery’s name made consistent everywhere, to match the printed logo.

Fast on a phone, in wine country

• Built for phones first, since that’s where most of their visitors are.
• Images cut from 12 MB to 4.6 MB by sizing each one for how it’s actually shown.
• Phones get their own smaller videos: 2.7 MB instead of 12 MB for the homepage video.
• Videos don’t download at all on slow connections or data saver.
• Bigger tap targets, no jumping sections on iPhone, and a menu that fits small phones.
• Pages ship almost no code, so they open fast.

Accessibility and search

• Audited against WCAG 2.1 AA: every text color combination on the site was measured for contrast, and the 11 that fell short were fixed.
• Heading order fixed for screen readers, visible keyboard focus, alt text on every image, and pinch-zoom left on.
• An accessibility statement that commits to the standard without overpromising.
• A sitemap, clean page addresses, social share cards, and behind-the-scenes data that tells Google the winery’s address, hours, and tasting offer.
• A summary file that helps AI search tools understand the winery.

Built to last

• The site updates itself: when a change is approved, it checks, builds, and publishes on its own.
• The contract system runs separately from the website, so the site can change without touching contracts.
• 45 automated tests check the contract system before any change goes out.
• Plain-English guides for the events staff, setup notes for non-developers, and documentation for any future developer.

More for the winery

• Outreach emails to bring in new business.
• A sales pitch for a restaurant partnership.
• A design package for the online store.
• A LinkedIn page kit.
• Plain-English guides for the staff.