The Cellar Calendar: What to Do in the Winery, Month by Month

A winery's year has a rhythm as fixed as the vineyard's, but where vines announce their schedule with buds and color, the cellar's deadlines arrive silently. This is the northern-hemisphere cellar year, month by month; southern producers, shift everything six months.

January to March: the quiet, critical stretch

• January: First racking of the new vintage off gross lees. Top every barrel; winter evaporation does not pause for holidays. Cold stabilization for whites while nature provides the chill. Year-end inventory reconciliation lands now too.
• February: Blending trials begin for the previous vintage. Monitor malolactic completion in the new wines, with lab confirmation. SO2 checks and adjustments across every vessel.
• March: Blend decisions finalized, which means tank moves, updated volumes, and new lot records. Book the mobile bottling line and order dry goods for spring bottling now; both sell out.

April to June: bottling season

• April: Pre-bottling prep: final filtration decisions, lab analyses for the back label, label approvals. Count every dry good against the run plan while there is still time to reorder.
• May: Bottling runs for whites, rosés, and early reds. Each run converts bulk liters to cases, the biggest inventory event of the year. Log finished goods by lot and location the same day.
• June: Post-bottling reconciliation: actual bottle counts vs plan, losses recorded, leftover dry goods counted back in. Newly bottled wines rest before release.

July to August: prepare for the storm

• July: Deep-clean everything. Service the crusher, press, pumps, and chiller now, not in September when the repair queue is three weeks long. Empty, wash, and gas or fill tanks.
• August: Harvest logistics: bins, buckets, dry ice or inert gas, yeast and nutrients ordered, picking crews and fruit intake scheduling confirmed. Make space: this year's harvest needs the tanks last year's wine is still sitting in.

September to December: harvest and the long exhale

• September and October: Crush. Fruit in, ferments tracked daily, presses running, every vessel's contents changing weekly. The months where record-keeping either happens at the point of work or never happens at all.
• November: Ferments finishing, wines settling, first post-harvest rackings. Barrels filled with the new vintage start their topping schedule. Holiday sales season peaks in the warehouse simultaneously.
• December: Year-end physical inventory count, holiday fulfillment, and the first tastes of the new vintage. Close the year with records that match reality and January stays calm.

Half of these tasks are wine work; the other half are inventory events wearing seasonal clothes: bottling runs, rackings, dry-goods orders, counts. Oenova keeps that half on rails year-round, so every month's movements are logged when they happen and December's count confirms instead of surprises. Free plan, 30-minute setup.