How to run a Saturday of tasting slots without a queue at the cellar door

How long should a tasting slot be?

Start from how long the pour actually takes when the room is busy, then add the time it takes to seat a party and take their money for a bottle on the way out. Most wineries running a structured flight land on slots of forty-five minutes to an hour and a quarter, and the ones who suffer are those who set the slot to the length of the tasting itself and then wonder why two o'clock and three o'clock are standing in the same doorway.

The slot length is a property of the day rather than of the flight, so pick one rhythm and publish every flight against it. A day cut into consistent arrival times is far easier to staff than one where a reserve tasting starts at ten past and a standard flight starts on the hour.

• Time your busiest real tasting, not your best one.
• Add the turnaround: seating, paying, the bottle they buy at the end.
• Use one rhythm across every flight so the door has one clock to read.
• Publish fewer, fuller slots rather than many thin ones — an empty slot still needs a person standing in it.

How many seats should each slot hold?

Each arrival slot holds its own stock, per flight, so this is a per-slot decision and not one number for the day. Set it from the smaller of what the room seats and what one host can genuinely pour for, and then subtract the seats you want to keep for the people who drive up the track without booking.

Two things eat capacity quietly. A club pass admits its holder at every session of the event it covers and consumes no seat in any of them, so if you sell forty passes for a release weekend you have to assume some of them arrive at your busiest slot. And a refunded seat is not returned to sale: the money goes back, the seat stays counted as sold. If you want to reopen a place, raise that slot's capacity by one.

• Set capacity per slot, not per day — a wet Sunday and a release Saturday are not the same room.
• Leave a couple of seats per slot unsold for walk-ups, and sell them at the door.
• Add headroom for club passes: they admit without consuming a seat.
• To reopen a place after a refund, raise the slot capacity — the refund will not do it.

What happens when a walk-up arrives at a full slot?

The day-of page shows live availability for every flight in every slot, so the first answer is usually the next slot rather than a refusal. Selling that seat at the door is a real sale: it takes a genuine hold on the inventory and carries you into the ordinary checkout on your own device, so the price is derived by the same code, the age rule applies, the card is captured properly and the visitor leaves with a code that scans.

What you must not do is treat the till page as the answer. The till records bottle and food sales for your own end-of-day numbers and takes no payment at all — it is not a way to sell a tasting seat, and a seat sold that way exists in nobody's inventory.

How do I scan when the tasting room has no signal?

Download the session manifest onto the door device before you lose the connection. From then on it scans against what it already holds, with no network, and replays everything it recorded when it gets back online. First scan wins, and a code that appears twice is queued as a conflict for a person to look at rather than silently resolved one way or the other.

Two operational details matter on the day. A tasting seat does not re-admit once it has been scanned, so scan at the point you actually seat somebody rather than at the gate. And at an age-gated door the console will not let you admit anybody without confirming the ID was checked — that is deliberate, and it is the reason your admission record is worth something afterwards.

• Pull the manifest while you still have signal, at the start of each session.
• Scan when you seat the party, not when they park.
• Confirm ID as part of admitting — the console will not proceed without it.
• Clear the conflict queue at the end of the day while people still remember.