BC Wine Authority & BC Wine Grape Council

The British Columbia Wine Authority (formerly BC VQA) runs BC’s wine standards program: wine approvals, tasting panels, winery memberships and invoicing. The BC Wine Grape Council represents the province’s grape growers, registering growers and vineyards and collecting tonnage declarations and levies from wineries.

Vigilante Marketing designed and built Oenos, the shared platform both organisations now run on at oenos.wine, migrated their legacy data, and provides ongoing development and support.

The Challenge

What They Needed

The British Columbia Wine Authority (BCWA, formerly BC VQA) runs the province’s wine standards program. It approves wines through scheduled tasting panels, manages winery memberships and invoices its members. The BC Wine Grape Council (BCWGC) registers the province’s grape growers and their vineyards, and collects tonnage declarations and levies from wineries.

Both organisations were running on ageing, separate systems built on Microsoft SQL Server and Azure. Everyday jobs depended on a developer: staff had to email an outside contractor for the random three-digit codes behind every tasting panel, and a simple fix like reversing a membership renewal meant someone editing the database by hand.

The BCWA came to us to replace its services site, and in April 2025 it recommended us to the Grape Council so both could share one platform. Wineries and growers deal with both bodies, so they wanted one modern system, one sign-in, and no lost history: more than half a million records had to come across intact.

It also had to fit the wine industry’s calendar. Panels run every few weeks, and grower registration and tonnage declarations follow the harvest, so there was never a quiet month to be offline.

Prototype First, Data Before Features

We started in Figma, prototyping each screen with the staff who would use it every day, then walked through the workflows with them live before building the logic behind them.

Our first engineering priority was the data. We imported, cleaned and cross-checked more than half a million records from several database formats against real winery files, so every screen was built on numbers staff already trusted. We then released Oenos in stages: the Wine Authority’s services site went live at oenos.wine in January 2026, grower registration followed in August 2026, and the Grape Council’s last records moved across from the old Azure system that September.

One Platform, Two Organisations

Oenos gives every kind of user their own portal behind one sign-in. Wine Authority staff, wineries, growers and Grape Council staff each see only what their role allows, and administrators can view the site as a member to help them on the spot.

Wine applications, assessment panel scheduling and panel tasting tools for assessors and moderators
Membership renewals and invoicing, with PDF invoices, statements and receivables reports
Grower and vineyard registration with vineyard Site IDs, plus Icewine and Late Harvest registrations
Winery tonnage uploads, levy declarations and levy receipts
Labels, certificates of origin and wine transfers
PDF and Excel exports for the reports staff and boards rely on

Oenos Administration Services Dashboard with member management, grower registration, invoices, reports, wine approvals and panel testing

Oenos annual grower registration form, step one grower details and step two vineyard details

Built to Change Safely

A platform that changes every week has to be safe to change. Every change ships with automated tests (more than 1,600 so far), and they run on every pull request before anything is merged.

Changes go to a staging copy first, where the client reviews them against real data, then to production in zero-downtime releases with a database backup taken before each one. Staging refreshes from production every night, so what gets tested is what members will see. Along the way we hardened the platform with role checks on every portal, an activity log of who changed what, and security patches applied promptly.

Support at the Speed of Harvest

Wine Authority and Grape Council staff email us directly, and most fixes and requests are live the same day. Since launch in January 2026 we have shipped 168 production releases, about four a week: new reports, invoicing changes, grower tools, and urgent fixes in the middle of a panel week.

When wildfire forced a panel week to be cancelled in August 2026, we moved every wine scheduled for it to a new panel week and reopened scheduling. Because we know both organisations’ rules, we can tell which requests belong to whom and check with the right person before anything changes.

Terminal showing an Oenos automated test run with 50 tests passing

By the Numbers

Legacy records migrated

Automated tests

Changes reviewed and merged

Production releases since launch

Under the Hood

Oenos is a custom Laravel 12 application on PHP 8.3 and PostgreSQL 17, with a Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js front end. It is tested with Pest on GitHub Actions, deployed with Laravel Forge in zero-downtime releases, and served through Cloudflare.

The Result?

The BC Wine Authority and the BC Wine Grape Council now share one modern platform that their staff, wineries and growers use every day. Routine work no longer waits on a developer, the history from both old systems lives in one place, and when they need something changed, it is usually done the same day.

Oenos was designed, built and is supported by Peter Vigilante, Aaron Caldwell and Brian Looney.

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