Quick start
Your first vintage
Nine steps, in the order a season takes them. Nothing here has to be done in one sitting — setup is skippable on purpose, and what is missing shows on the dashboard rather than standing in your way.
Two ways in, depending on where you are starting.
Say where the wine is made
Premises address, and — if you are bonded — the registry and bond numbers. Everything here can be skipped and filled in later; what is missing shows on the dashboard rather than blocking the way in.
RecordsYour winery record. The return is built from it, and a filed one keeps its own frozen copy.
Add your vessels
Tanks, barrels, carboys, with their capacities. Capacity is what stops a move putting 400 gallons into a 300-gallon tank, so it is worth being right.
RecordsVessels. Their fill is a view of the ledger, never typed in.
Set up the vineyard, or name your growers
Blocks and plantings for fruit you farm; a grower record for fruit you buy. They are different things on purpose — a block carries a ripeness window and a spray log, which belong to whoever farms the ground.
RecordsBlocks, plantings and fruit sources.
Write the wine program
What this wine is meant to be: which fruit goes into it and in what share, the yeast, the nutrients, and the profile you are aiming at on eight axes. One plan can hold several ferments — a free run and a press fraction are two ferments of one wine, not two wines.
RecordsA wine program. Almost everything the app later says is DUE is derived from it — the nutrient feeds, the ferment steps, the finishing and the bottling run.
Weigh the fruit in
Tons off a planting or from a grower, on the day. Tons are the one figure in this app that is not a view of the ledger, which is exactly what lets them check it later — including against the shares the plan asked for, which is why the plan is worth writing before the fruit arrives rather than after.
RecordsA harvest. Nothing is posted to the books yet.
Create the lot
Name the fruit's origin and the lot picks up any untied harvests of it. Name the wine program too and the lot becomes a thread through it — that is what gives the lot its feeds and its steps. Creating a lot posts the wine onto the bulk book.
RecordsA lot, and a `produced` movement — the first entry in your ledger.
Record what happens to it
Gravity, temperature, pH and TA as they are measured; cap work as it is done; additions with the weighed dose. The app derives what is due from these — nothing is a stored reminder you have to tick off.
RecordsLot readings, steps and additions.
Move the wine
Rack, press, filter, blend, bottle. Every move is one vessel to one vessel and writes its own entry, including the loss. That is why the ledger can be trusted later.
RecordsMovements. Append-only — a correction is a reversing entry, never an edit.
Check the books, and file if you file
The operations report reconciles what the ledger says against what the lots add up to. A gap is information, not a fault — wine evaporates and gets mis-measured. Commercial accounts file TTB F 5120.17 from it; hobbyist accounts keep the same ledger without the form.
RecordsA filed return, frozen as filed. Amendments supersede; they never overwrite.
Already making wine?
The guide above starts from an empty account. If you are moving to Fermata part way through — wine in barrel, cases in the library, a year of paper the app has never seen — these come first. Following the first guide from there would open your account at zero and report a real cellar as a loss.
Put in the wine you already had
The gallons on hand — bulk and cased — at the start of the first year Fermata holds, with the year. Wine that was on the premises before this ledger existed was never produced by a movement in it, so without this the operations report opens at zero and reports your whole cellar as a shortfall. It is deliberately not a movement: the book records wine arriving, leaving and changing hands, and this wine did none of those. Take the figures off the last return you filed on paper.
RecordsAn opening balance on the winery, and the year it belongs to. Nothing in the ledger.
Create the lots that are still in the cellar
One lot per vessel of wine you are still working. Give it the code you already use — Fermata will not rename it — and the volume as it stands today, not as it was at the press. Origin is a picker of your own blocks and growers, but a lot carried in from before often has no pick to point at, and "Something else" takes free text for that. Fruit is only linkable where you weigh it in here, so an older lot will read "no harvest is linked" for ever — which is true, and better than a guess.
RecordsA lot, its volume, and a `produced` entry for those gallons.
Enter the wines already in bottle
A wine bottled before this ledger existed has no bottling movement behind it. Enter its case count and the app treats that as a carry-in and says so on the card, rather than deriving zero and reporting the wine sold out. Removals you log from here on come off it normally.
RecordsA wine, with its case count read as an opening figure rather than as a bottling.
Catch the ledger up, or start it from today
Two honest choices and the app does not prefer one. Enter this year's movements so far — removals, transfers, losses — and the books reconcile from the start of the year. Or start the ledger from today and keep the earlier months in the records you already have; the carry-in above is then the figure that ties the two together. What the app will not do is invent the difference.
RecordsMovements, on the append-only ledger. A correction is a reversing entry, never an edit.
Keep what this does not hold
Fermata records what you tell it and computes from that. It does not hold your excise payments, your COLA approvals, your label files, or the returns you filed before you arrived — and it does not advise on any of them. Those stay wherever they are now. Everything Fermata does hold can be exported to CSV at any time, on either tier.
RecordsNothing. This step is about what stays outside the app.
Then follow the first guide from step four
The vessels, the vineyard and the programs are the same whether it is your first vintage or your ninth. Come back to the guide above at "Write the wine program" and carry on from there.
RecordsThe same records the first guide names.
Then what
The reference goes section by section, and says what each part of the app refuses to do and why — which is most of what people actually write in to ask.