How Bertus van Zyl Runs Production at Tank Garage, James Cole, and Belong Wine Co.
Bertus van Zyl grew up in Cape Town and got hooked on wine at age fifteen, through a school enrichment course in Stellenbosch, the heart of South Africa’s wine country. He studied at the University of Stellenbosch, some would say the country’s UC Davis equivalent, took his first full-time job at the Hess family’s Glen Carlou’s project, and came to Napa in 2010 for his first international harvest. He has been with FARM Collective since 2012, helped launch Tank Garage from a concept in a barrel to its eleventh anniversary, and today runs winemaking for Tank Garage, James Cole, and his own label, Belong Wine Co.
Running a small winery that makes 20-25 distinct wines a year across three brands and ships to a DTC club four times annually is what Bertus calls “organized chaos.” At the height of it, he was managing four facilities, 60+ SKUs, and production across three or four locations with a cellar team of three. This episode dives into how he keeps it all moving without burning out, and what had to change when paper inventories and ruled notepads stopped scaling.
In this episode, we cover:
How small wine producers maintain control across many SKUs without micromanaging the team
The compliance and inventory cracks that show up first when a small winery scales
How to balance creative freedom in harvest with structured bottling planning across five bottling runs a year
Why Tank Garage's never-repeat production model (20-25 unique wines a year) demands a different operations playbook than a traditional brand
The remote-first workflow that lets Bertus manage production from a vineyard with just an iPad
What's worth investing in for small producers, and what wine-industry hype to ignore
Why compliance and inventory break first when a small winery scales
When Bertus started at FARM Collective in 2012, inventory lived on a ruled notepad that stayed on the counter at the winery. He’d grown up around a DOS-based system in South Africa, so he had a sense for what good software could do, but for a long time the day-to-day was paper work orders, folders that got thicker every week, and a lot of mental load.
The cracks didn’t show up in winemaking quality. They showed up in compliance, dry goods, and barrel tracking. Where’s the missing barrel? How many capsules do we actually have? Are those stored at the off-site warehouse or at the production facility? With 60+ SKUs across multiple locations, every one of those small uncertainties stacked into a real cost: hours at the end of the day, late-night reconciliations, the slow grind toward burnout.
The other thing that broke was Bertus’s ability to micromanage anyone, which turned out to be a gift. With teams that small and that much going on, he couldn’t be everywhere at once. He had to train people well, hand them clear systems, and trust them to run. That management style stuck.
What the breaking points were was very much just the compliance side of things and trying to keep track of inventory and barrels, and why are we off? Like, where's this barrel that we had in inventory? It said we had 20, and now we can only find 19.
Bertus van Zyl , Head Winemaker
FARM Collective
Expert Tip: If your team is running off paper work orders and a single inventory notepad, the first thing to instrument isn't winemaking — it's the boring layer underneath. Dry goods, barrel counts, additive tracking, and TTB-ready records are where small producers lose hours they don't realize they're losing. Fix that first, and the rest of the workflow gets smoother.
How a small producer plans 20+ unique wines a year without losing the thread
Tank Garage has a single founding rule: never repeat a wine. Over the years, that has meant working with more than 50 different varieties, sourcing from Anderson Valley down to Santa Barbara and east into the Sierra foothills, and releasing 20 to 25 distinct wines each year through a 100% DTC club that ships four times annually. Production sizes swing wildly, from a single-barrel club exclusive to a 700-case rosé.
The way Bertus keeps that coherent is a living, shared Google Sheet that functions as the year’s production plan, paired with InnoVint as the source of truth for what’s actually in tank, in barrel, and ready to move. The plan is built collaboratively with the GM and the ownership team. James and Ed (the brand’s owners) often start with a label concept and ask the cellar what’s available that fits the vibe. Other times the cellar tastes something compelling and pulls them in the other direction. Both paths lead to the same place: a defined blend, a unique bottling slot, and a release.
The flexibility this requires is real. Up until about a week before bottling, blends can still shift. If a club allocation isn’t moving, the team can bottle 50 cases of one wine and push the rest into something else. That kind of late-stage pivoting only works if inventory is accurate, blend components are tracked, and everyone is looking at the same numbers.
We have clear guidelines and places we want to get to, but very often we don't know where that wine's going to end up that we're making. There's a lot of freedom in harvest, but then the closer you get to making those blends and coming up with the labels, that's where it's a lot more of a team kind of environment.
Bertus van Zyl , Head Winemaker
FARM Collective
For a never-repeat brand or any small producer working with high SKU counts, treat your production plan as a living real-time document, not an annual one. Bertus's team reviews and updates the plan continuously, which is what makes the week-before-bottling pivot possible. The plan only works if the underlying inventory and blend data is current.
The remote-first workday: managing production from the vineyard
Bertus’s day usually starts with school drop-off, which means his crew is already moving by the time he gets to a vineyard or office. That arrangement only works because the morning’s work orders are fully laid out the night before. Everyone knows what they’re doing until lunch. The bottling prep, the topping schedule, the additions, the rack-and-returns are all on the calendar before he sets foot in a vineyard.
Tank Garage’s sourcing is spread across the state, so Bertus is on the road often. Most harvest decisions are made by taste, not numbers, which means time on the ground in the vineyard is non-negotiable. An iPad with a working connection gives him real-time access to fermentation data, work order status, and inventory while he’s out walking blocks. If a question comes up at the winery, he can answer it from a vineyard road without driving back.
The night shift is real, too. Most of Bertus’s planning, blend prep, and review of the day’s tasting notes happens after his kids are in bed, when the cellar is quiet and he can think. The structure during the day exists to make that quiet hour at night actually count, instead of being eaten by reconciliation work that should have been automated.
Having a system set up where I can be out there with my iPad — if a question pops up, I don't have to pull out my laptop and be like, okay wait, what's going on? I can literally answer a question about a work order really quickly. It just frees up all that time, and knowing that everything keeps ticking along at the winery.
Bertus van Zyl , Head Winemaker
FARM Collective
If you're the bottleneck for every cellar question, you're not running remote, you're running blocked. Front-load the morning's work orders the night before, give your team the ability to see what's planned without asking, and use mobile access to handle the exceptions from wherever you actually need to be that day.
Bottling 8 to 13 SKUs in a single day with a team of three
FARM Collective bottles five times a year: January, February, June, July, and December. A typical bottling day at this small producer is between 8 and 13 SKUs. The mobile bottler shows up and asks what kind of mold or label orientation they’re going to be wrestling with this time, as its always different.
That kind of density only works because Bertus’s team is operating two or three threads at once year-round. While they’re prepping a bottling run, they’re also tasting blends, fine-tuning filtration on the next run, managing the topping schedule, and starting bottling prep for the next month out. The team is three people plus an intern or two in season. There isn’t time to be reactive.
The proactive piece is what makes the math work. Bertus’s calendar separates fixed obligations like bottling dates, club ship dates, and harvest receival from flexible work such as topping, rack-and-return, and blending sessions, then sequences the flexible work into the gaps. The whole system runs on the assumption that nothing waits to be asked about. If a tank needs topping in three days, that work order is already on someone’s docket.
We bottle five times a year, and typically our bottling days are between eight and 13 SKUs in a single day. We're the mobile bottler's favorite place to come to.
Bertus van Zyl , Head Winemaker
FARM Collective
A small team can move more volume than its headcount suggests if the calendar is sequenced right. Treat bottling prep, blending, and cellar work as overlapping streams instead of sequential phases. The bottleneck is usually planning, not labor.
What’s worth adopting now, and what’s hype to ignore
When Bertus looks back at what he wishes he’d adopted earlier, the answer is automation, full stop. Replacing the paper folder with a real system, getting compliance and dry goods and bottling into one place, hooking up fractional accounting and a compliance partner to the same source of truth, every one of those moves bought back hours that used to disappear into late-night reconciliations.
His framing for any new system is straightforward: what is my own time actually worth? The second another brand, another sales channel, another bottling line, or another compliance question gets added, the spreadsheet becomes the thing keeping you up at 11 PM, looking for a missing file you swore was attached to an email.
On the hype side, he’s more skeptical. He’s been pitched a lot of farming and monitoring software, and most of it doesn’t pencil out against the size of FARM’s owned vineyards. AI tools and new vineyard tech have to clear a real ROI bar, not just a “this sounds clever” bar. And he was an early adopter of Twitter for industry conversation, which paid off for a while, then stopped. He’s off the main socials now.
It's really critical anything you can do, any system that you have in place to make sure your operations are running as high a quality as you want. Other things get added on, and all of a sudden you find yourself 11 o'clock at night trying to consolidate something or find a missing file.
Bertus van Zyl , Head Winemaker
FARM Collective
Before you buy any new tool, run the same calculation Bertus does: what does the hour I'd save with this cost me today? For small producers, the strongest ROI is almost never in flashy new categories. It's in replacing the spreadsheet and the paper folder with a single system the whole team uses.
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Frequently Asked Questions about This Topic
How do small wine producers manage operations without burning out? +
Small producers stay sane by front-loading planning and trusting the team to execute. Bertus van Zyl runs production for three brands (Tank Garage, James Cole, Belong) with a three-person cellar team by writing the next day's work orders the night before, using software that gives the team real-time visibility, and protecting his own time for vineyard work and blending decisions. The pattern is consistent across most small wineries that scale successfully: clear systems, empowered staff, and a single source of truth for inventory and compliance.
What is the first thing that breaks when a small winery scales production? +
Inventory and compliance break first. When a small producer scales to 30+ SKUs or starts spanning multiple locations, paper-based tracking starts to fail in predictable ways: missing barrels, lost capsule counts, additive records that can't be reconstructed for TTB reporting, and blend components that don't reconcile. The winemaking itself often holds up long after the supporting operations have stopped scaling.
How does a small producer plan a never-repeat wine release each year? +
A never-repeat small producer like Tank Garage plans its year using a living, shared production sheet paired with winery management software as the source of truth for inventory. The brand makes 20-25 unique wines a year from 50+ varieties and four club shipments. Planning happens collaboratively between the winemaker, GM, and ownership team, often starting from a label concept or a compelling wine in the cellar. Blends remain flexible up to about a week before bottling, which is only possible because the underlying inventory and component data is kept current.
How many SKUs can a small winery bottle in a single day? +
A well-organized small winery with a mobile bottler can run 8 to 13 SKUs in a single day. FARM Collective bottles five times a year (January, February, June, July, December) at this density, with a three-person cellar team plus interns. The constraint isn't usually labor on bottling day — it's whether the team has front-loaded the blending, filtration prep, dry goods staging, and label orientation work in the weeks before.
When should a small wine producer invest in winery management software? +
A small producer should invest in winery management software when the cost of disorganization (late-night reconciliations, missing inventory, compliance scrambles) starts to exceed the cost of the system. Once a producer adds a second brand, a second location, a custom crush arrangement, or any meaningful DTC sales channel, software almost always wins on time saved alone — without counting the compliance and quality benefits.