Key Takeaways

• A quick winery Google Business Profile and website audit before spring can prevent lost visitors and missed bookings
• Outdated hours, stale photos, and missing reservation links are the most common — and most avoidable — problems
• Google replaced Q&A with an AI-powered Ask Maps tool — which makes profile accuracy more important than it used to be
• Spring is the best time to push your wine club page: visitors are actively planning summer outings
• Running this checklist twice a year takes a couple of hours and saves a lot of headaches

The season starts before your first visitor arrives

Every spring, wineries spend real time and money getting the tasting room ready — cleaning up after winter, restocking, refreshing staff, locking in the events calendar. All of that matters. But there’s a version of “getting ready” that happens online, and a lot of wineries skip it entirely.

The result? Someone searches for your winery, finds last winter’s hours, and assumes you’re not open yet. A first-time visitor tries to book a tasting and hits a broken link. A wine club prospect lands on a page that hasn’t been updated since you launched your site. None of these are catastrophic on their own — but they’re all avoidable, and they add up over a busy season.

Here’s what’s worth reviewing on both your winery Google Business Profile and your website before things get busy.

Winery Google Business Profile updates

Your Google Business Profile is often the first thing a potential visitor sees — sometimes before they reach your website at all. It’s the information box that appears when someone searches your winery by name, and it’s what shows up when someone is driving around looking for somewhere to go. Keeping it current is one of the cheapest, highest-impact things you can do before busy season.

Hours

Start here. If you’re moving to extended spring and summer hours, update them now — not after you’ve already been open for two weeks on the new schedule. You can also set holiday and special event hours in advance so Google doesn’t show the wrong information on a busy weekend. Outdated hours are one of the most common reasons a visitor shows up to a closed tasting room. They don’t usually come back.

Photos

A harvest photo or snow-covered vineyard shot in April tells visitors your profile is on autopilot. Swap in something current — green vines, the outdoor patio, people actually enjoying a tasting. If you don’t have fresh spring photos yet, a few decent phone shots of current conditions are better than leaving winter imagery up.

Read: Winery Photography Tips that Actually Help Your Marketing

Wine list and tasting menu

Remove anything that sold out over winter. Add your current releases. If you have a spring vintage coming out, this is a simple place to mention it. Visitors check this before they arrive — don’t let them show up expecting something you no longer have.

Services and experiences

Make sure your tasting experiences, private events, wine club details, and seasonal offerings are listed accurately. If you’ve added something new for summer — a seated tasting, a vineyard tour, a club pickup event — add it here. These details feed into how Google describes your business to people who haven’t visited before.

Profile completeness matters more than it used to

Google recently removed the Q&A feature from Business Profiles and replaced it with an AI-powered tool called Ask Maps. Instead of business owners writing their own questions and answers, Google’s AI now generates responses to visitor questions automatically — pulling from your profile, your reviews, and your website.

In practice, that means if your profile is thin or out of date, the AI fills in the gaps on its own — and not always accurately. Questions like “Do I need a reservation?” or “Are dogs allowed?” or “What’s the tasting fee?” will get answered whether your profile supports a good answer or not. Fill out every section, keep your service descriptions detailed, and make sure what’s on your website matches what’s on your profile.

Google Posts

Most wineries never use this feature, which is a missed opportunity. Short posts about upcoming events, new releases, or seasonal promotions show up directly in search results — right next to your hours and location. If you haven’t posted anything in months, getting two or three posts live before the season starts is a quick, free way to look active to anyone who finds you on Google.

Reservation link

If you use a platform like Tock or Resy, click your booking link yourself. Right now. A broken reservation link at the start of busy season is the kind of thing you find out about three weeks in when someone mentions it offhand. Don’t wait for that.

Winery website updates

This isn’t about rebuilding your site. It’s about finding the things that are quietly wrong — the outdated page nobody’s looked at since last October, the sold-out wine still featured in the shop, the events page still showing last year’s calendar. Here’s where to look.

Events page

Is it showing this spring’s events, or last fall’s? Or nothing at all? An empty events page signals that nothing is happening, even if your calendar is packed. Add what you have now and fill in the rest as you confirm dates. Even a couple of events listed is better than a blank page or a stale one.

Wine shop

Go through your shop like a first-time customer would. Is anything sold out? Remove it or mark it clearly. New vintages coming this spring? Feature them up front. Visitors who had a good tasting room experience often check your shop when they get home — a page that looks like it hasn’t been touched in six months undercuts that follow-through.

Tip: If you’re thinking about how your website supports online wine sales more broadly, our post on winery website must-haves covers what today’s buyers actually expect when they land on your site.

Tasting room page

Hours, pricing, experience descriptions, reservation link — check all of it. This is often the last page someone reads before deciding whether to book. Make sure it reflects what a visitor will actually experience when they show up, including anything new you’ve added for the season.

Homepage

Does it feel like April, or does it feel like last October? A harvest photo at the top of the page in spring isn’t a crisis, but it’s a quiet signal that the site isn’t being maintained. Swapping the main image and refreshing a headline takes twenty minutes and makes the whole site feel current.

Wine club page

Spring is genuinely the best time of year to convert tasting room visitors into wine club members. People are starting to plan their summer — they’re in a good mood, they’re thinking about experiences — and a great tasting is exactly the kind of thing that tips someone into signing up. Is your wine club page easy to find? Does it clearly explain what members get? Is the signup simple?

If the answer to any of those is “not really,” fix it before the season starts. We’ve written about how the tasting room visit is your best marketing asset — a lot of that comes down to whether your site is set up to catch the interest a visit creates.

Contact and directions

Phone number still right? Email address current? Directions accurate? This is the kind of thing that goes stale quietly — especially after staff changes or a road that got renamed. Takes thirty seconds to confirm.

Check it on your phone

Most people searching for wineries are on their phones. Pull yours out and click through your site the way a visitor would. Can you read it easily? Does the reservation button work? Can you find the hours without zooming in? If something feels clunky, it’s worth a fix before you’re deep into the season and don’t have time to deal with it.

Check your winery’s online infrastructure twice a year, and it stops being a big deal

The reason this stuff piles up is that most wineries do one big website project and then don’t look at it again for a year or two. Meanwhile the business keeps changing — new vintages, new staff, new experiences, new hours — and the site quietly drifts out of sync with reality.

Running through this checklist twice a year (once before spring, once before harvest) keeps things from falling apart in the background. It takes a couple of hours and saves a lot of headaches during the months when you’re too busy to deal with a broken booking link or a sold-out wine that’s still showing as available.

If you don’t know where to start: hours first, then your reservation link, then your wine club page. Those three things have the most direct impact on whether a visitor becomes a guest — or moves on to the winery down the road.