Winery Supply and Demand Planning: A Six-Step Framework with Andrea Savaiano, Wine Industry Consultant
Andrea Savaiano grew up in the Willamette Valley, went to college in Walla Walla, and started her wine industry career as a business analyst at a vineyard development company in Napa before spending six years in tech working in sales analytics and data strategy. She returned to wine in 2018, joining Kosta Browne, then moving to Duckhorn, then to DuMOL where she led DTC and marketing. At DuMOL, her team grew sales by 45% and increased customers by 35% over three years, and one of the most consequential things she worked on there was building a supply and demand alignment process from the ground up. She now runs her own wine brand and consults with wineries on data analytics, sustainable growth planning, and DTC strategy.
She sat down with Lauren Heindel to walk through the six-step process she developed for aligning what a winery produces with what it can actually sell. No specialized software required, just a focused process and the data most wineries already have.
Most wineries have experienced one side of the misalignment problem or the other: the best-selling wine that runs out mid-season, or the pallets of inventory that have been sitting in the warehouse longer than they should. Both are symptoms of the same underlying gap, and both have cash flow consequences that hit smaller wineries harder than larger ones. A large operation can hold inventory and wait it out. A small or mid-size winery making 5,000 to 10,000 cases has less flexibility and fewer options, which means the planning work matters more, not less.
In this episode, we cover:
Why supply and demand alignment is more urgent for small and mid-sized wineries than for large operations, despite the common assumption that it is only a big-winery concern
How to set a meaningful time horizon for planning: why three to five years covers the span where you can actually make material change
What data to pull on both the supply and demand sides, and why direction matters more than precision at the start
How to map production against sales to see surpluses and shortfalls by SKU before they become operational problems
Why accountability, not the plan itself, is the step that determines whether this process actually gets implemented
The four keys to making this work year after year: stakeholder buy-in, accountability, consistency, and transparency
Why this matters more for small wineries
The assumption that supply and demand planning is only for operations producing hundreds of thousands of cases is exactly backward. The consequences of getting it wrong are more severe at smaller scale precisely because the options for recovering are fewer. A large wine company with excess inventory has wholesale channels, distribution relationships, and marketing budgets to move product. A winery making 5,000 or 10,000 cases has limited capacity to discount, limited channel access, and limited cash to absorb inventory that is not moving.
The same logic applies in the other direction. Running out of a wine that customers want is not just a lost sale. It is a frustrated customer, potentially a wine club cancellation, and a missed opportunity to generate the cash that could fund quality improvements or sales investment. For a DTC-focused small winery, that cash flow matters immediately.
The stakes are even higher for smaller and mid-sized wineries because of the cash implications and the options for moving excess inventory. If you're only making 5,000 or 10,000 cases a year, making too much of the wrong thing or not enough of the right thing can really tie up a lot of cash or frustrate your customers when you don't have the wine they want.
Andrea Savaiano , Wine Industry Consultant
The good news is that the planning process does not require expensive software or a dedicated analyst. The data most wineries need already exists in their production records and sales history. What the process provides is a way to put that data in conversation with itself, to see where production and sales are aligned and where they are not, before those gaps create problems rather than after.
Before going through the full six-step process, run a quick test on two or three of your highest-volume SKUs. Compare current inventory against recent sales velocity for each one. If you can look at those numbers and say with confidence whether you have more or less than you need for the next twelve months, you already have a working version of the process. If the numbers are not in a format that makes that comparison easy, that is exactly where to start.
Setting the time horizon and pulling the data
The first step in Andrea’s framework is establishing how far out the planning window extends. She recommends three to five years, which covers roughly three vintage years on the production side and five to six sales years on the demand side. The reason that window matters is that it is the span within which you can actually make meaningful adjustments: changing vineyard contracts, adjusting production volumes up or down, building new sales channels, or revising pricing to influence demand. A one-year view is not enough lead time to act on what you find.
Once the horizon is set, the data pull covers both sides. For supply, that means every source of wine the winery currently has or expects to have during the time window: all case goods inventory, all wine currently in tank or barrel, and all projected yields from vineyard contracts or estate plantings over the production horizon. The goal is to convert everything to nine-liter equivalent cases so the units are comparable across the full picture.
For demand, the starting point is sales history by SKU and by channel, used as the basis for projecting forward through the time horizon. Andrea is explicit that this part does not need to be precise, and trying to make it precise is a common reason people never start.
This is about direction, not perfection. Any number will get you directionally closer than where you are today. We know the projections are wrong, but the thing with a good forecast, you know it's wrong, but is it useful?
Andrea Savaiano , Wine Industry Consultant
The other recommendation for this step is to involve the people who hold the relevant knowledge: production leaders for the supply projections, sales leaders for the demand projections. Bringing them in at the data-gathering stage rather than only at the action-planning stage has two effects. Their input makes the numbers more accurate. And their participation in building the numbers creates buy-in for the plan that follows, because they helped produce the picture rather than being handed it.
When projecting sales for vintages that will age before release, remember to extend the demand timeline accordingly. Wine produced from the 2028 vintage may not sell through until 2030 or 2031. Your sales projections need to account for this so you are not measuring a 2028 production decision against a 2028 sales window when the actual sale window is two or three years later.
Mapping supply to demand and creating the action plan
With supply and demand data assembled for the full time horizon, step three is putting them on the same page, literally. The visual comparison by SKU and vintage year shows where the winery is long (too much wine, not enough demand) and where it is short (not enough wine to meet projected demand). Some gaps resolve in the planning process itself, because seeing them clearly allows simple adjustments that were not visible before. Others require a deliberate response.
Step four is building the action plan to address the gaps that require deliberate response, and this step requires a cross-functional group, not a single person working alone. Production leaders, sales leaders, and whoever handles finance all hold different pieces of the picture, and the right solution for a given gap depends on information from all three.
The levers available vary by situation. A winery that is long on a particular SKU might develop a corporate gifting program, open new wholesale or DTC channels, or adjust pricing to accelerate sell-through. A winery that is short on a high-demand varietal might source additional fruit or adjust the allocation model. Neither solution is obvious from inside a single department, and the best answer often comes from a conversation across all three.
No single person has the full picture here, and there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Every winery will have different levers to pull based on whether they need to increase demand, increase supply, or decrease on either side. The problem-solving really has to be unique to each winery, and it will be more powerful the more people you get in the room.
Andrea Savaiano , Wine Industry Consultant
The action plan that results from this conversation is not just a list of ideas. It needs to be specific enough to assign ownership to: who is doing what, by when, and against what target. Without that specificity, the plan stays conceptual.
When mapping supply to demand, build a visual even if it is as simple as a bar chart in Excel. Seeing surpluses and shortfalls as a graphic rather than a table of numbers makes the gaps immediately legible to everyone in the room, including people who do not spend most of their time in spreadsheets. The shared visual is often what converts a room full of information into a room full of people who understand the problem the same way.
Accountability and the annual process
Step five is the one Andrea calls potentially the most important: assigning a single point person to own the execution of the action plan and ensure the feedback loop closes. A plan without an owner tends to get absorbed by the daily operational demands that always feel more urgent and never quite comes back around.
The right person for this role is not necessarily defined by title. It is defined by personality and organizational position: the person who other people at the winery trust to follow through, who can hold the team accountable without creating conflict, and who has enough visibility across departments to know when an action item is off track. Some wineries find that an outside consultant fills this role effectively because it removes the interpersonal friction of internal accountability.
Without this critical step of accountability, you really just have another pretty spreadsheet and a process that kind of gets swept under the rug.
Andrea Savaiano , Wine Industry Consultant
Step six is the annual revisit, and the timing matters. Andrea landed on March through May as the right window at DuMOL, after harvest and before the summer selling season, when both the production and sales teams have the capacity to engage fully. Attempting this process during harvest or during the peak of OND planning means one of the most important stakeholder groups cannot participate. The first annual revisit is always the hardest because it starts from scratch. Subsequent years are significantly faster because the baseline is already built, the projections only need updating, and the action list is shorter because some of the prior year’s gaps have been addressed.
Andrea's advice for wineries that feel overwhelmed by the full six-step process is to start with a scaled-down version today: pick two or three of your biggest SKUs, map current inventory against sales velocity, and decide for each one whether to sell aggressively, hold, or offload. This mini process gives you immediate useful information on the inventory that matters most, creates momentum toward the full process, and takes a few hours rather than a dedicated project. The full framework is built from exactly this kind of starting point.
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Frequently Asked Questions about Winery Supply and Demand Planning
What is supply and demand alignment for wineries? +
Supply and demand alignment for wineries is the process of comparing projected production volumes against projected sales by SKU and channel over a multi-year horizon, identifying where the winery has too much or too little relative to what the market will absorb, and creating a specific action plan to close those gaps. The goal is to produce exactly what the winery can sell and sell exactly what it produces, which protects cash flow, improves customer satisfaction, and reduces reliance on last-minute discounting or channel shifts.
How far in advance should wineries plan for supply and demand? +
The recommended planning horizon is three to five years, covering approximately three vintage years on the production side and five to six sales years on the demand side. This window is the span within which a winery can make meaningful changes: adjusting vineyard contracts, modifying production volumes, building new sales channels, or changing pricing to influence demand. A one-year horizon does not provide enough lead time to act on most of what the planning process reveals.
Can small wineries benefit from supply and demand planning? +
Small and mid-sized wineries benefit more from supply and demand planning than large operations, not less. A large wine company has wholesale channels, distribution scale, and marketing budgets to move excess inventory or compensate for shortfalls. A small winery making 5,000 to 10,000 cases has fewer options and less time to absorb misalignment before it creates a cash flow problem. The planning process itself does not require specialized software: Excel or Google Sheets is sufficient to build a meaningful supply and demand map.
Who should be involved in the winery supply and demand planning process? +
Supply and demand planning requires input from winemaking, sales, and leadership, because no single department has the full picture. Production leaders hold the supply data and can project yields. Sales leaders hold the demand history and can build projections by channel. Leadership provides context on business priorities and resource constraints. Bringing all three groups into the data-gathering and action-planning steps produces more accurate projections and ensures buy-in for the plan, because the people responsible for executing it helped build it.
How do you maintain accountability in a winery supply and demand plan? +
Accountability requires a single named point person who is responsible for ensuring that the action items in the plan are followed through and that results are tracked and fed back into the plan. This person may sit in marketing, sales, production, or general management, depending on the winery's structure, but the role is defined more by personality than by title: it is the person who others trust to hold the team to commitments. Without a designated owner, the plan typically gets displaced by daily operational priorities and is not revisited until the next annual cycle, by which point the opportunity to act on the gaps has often passed.