Multiple websites became one platform for an entire wine region

The problem

Barossa Australia represents more than 550 grape growers, 170 wineries and 220 tourism operators in South Australia’s best-known wine region. By 2024 it was running five separate websites on five different systems, and a previous attempt to consolidate them had been abandoned partway through, at significant cost.

Most of what the site needs to say about the region does not belong to it. Listings for every winery, cellar door and place to stay come from the national tourism database, where each operator maintains their own. That feed is the lifeblood of the site and the source of its worst problems: it arrives in a shape nobody would choose, it mixes one-off events with year-round experiences, and their members complained about the result more than anything else. The brief was blunt about the existing search: “absolutely shocking”.

What we built

The foundations, before the website

The first work was not a page. It was the infrastructure the site would stand on, written down as code so it can be rebuilt, scaled up for a campaign and scaled back down afterwards without anyone logging into a console. Over the following year it was tuned against real traffic, then deliberately simplified once the data showed how much of the load never reached the servers at all.

A catalogue that updates itself overnight, without overwriting anyone

Every night the site takes the whole region’s listings from the national database, works out what changed, and publishes it. The hard requirement was editorial: the team curates these listings, and an automatic update must never quietly undo a person’s work. So when the database later disagrees with something a member of staff has written, the difference is put in front of a human to accept or reject instead of being applied. The tangle in the source data, where a winery, its tours and each of its rooms all arrive as unrelated entries, is untangled into something a visitor can actually browse.

Search and filters built around the complaints

The search was rebuilt to rank the way a person expects, and the filters change with the page, so a dining page offers cuisines and a winery page offers grape varieties. The events calendar, the single loudest complaint from members, became something you can filter down rather than scroll through.

A wine school moved in, not rebuilt

The region’s wine education programme ran on its own ageing site. Its courses, quizzes, certificates and 950 students were moved into the main platform with every student’s progress and results intact, so nobody had to start a course again.

The hard part

Not every problem is the one you are shown. Duplicate listings kept appearing in the browsing grids, and the obvious explanations were wrong three times over. It took several rounds, each narrowing the cause, before the real one was pinned down and fixed properly rather than papered over. The site now ships with a way for the client to check for themselves, which is the point: they should not have to take our word for it.

One morning in March 2026 the site went down for six minutes under an unusual burst of traffic. What the client got afterwards was a written account that separated the actual cause from the things that merely happened at the same time, cleared the obvious suspect with evidence, and ranked the fixes by what they would actually prevent. Knowing why something broke is worth more than a promise it will not happen again.

What it changed

One platform now serves the region. More than 850 listings stay current every night without anyone re-keying them, the events calendar answers the complaint that prompted the project, and a wine school’s students kept their history. In a typical week the site answers 2.4 million requests, nine in ten of them without a server being troubled, and the rest are answered without error 99.97 percent of the time. The whole environment is written down, so whoever comes next can understand it. The platform is live at barossa.com.