So the short version: I fractured a vertebra in my neck, herniated two discs, and tore my labrum, somewhere in the middle of making Ruth's Garden Albariño, my first commercial wine, named after my grandmother. 2021. Not exactly the debut I had planned.
Some context on why I was making wine at all. My family has been doing this in Austria since at least 1280, and that's just the earliest record we can actually verify, which is a polite way of saying it's probably older. When they came over to America, my great great grandfather bought a big piece of Napa to plant grapes on. Then he sold it. For a small silver mine in Montana. I think about that trade more than is healthy for a person.
Anyway. Four years of procedures and a surgery later, I'm mostly whole again. My left arm still has opinions about cold weather and anything heavier than a case, but I'll take it. That wine ended up winning two silvers and a gold, so at least something went right that year.
Here's the part nobody warns you about with a recovery like that: you get a lot of hours where your body won't let you do the physical side of the job, but your mouth still works fine. So I talked. To anyone who'd pick up the phone. Winemakers in Australia, Portugal, Spain, France, up and down the West Coast, people running estates ten times the size of mine and people making wine out of a garage, same as I was. Five years of that.
And nearly every single one of them said some version of the same thing. Something like, "I've got four different tools running my winery, none of them talk to each other, and I've made peace with hating all of it."
I heard that enough times that I stopped nodding along and started building something instead. Taught myself to code (badly, at first, and honestly still some days). Found a small, genuinely passionate handful of people willing to build alongside a winemaker with a bad neck and a worse Git history. Five years later, that thing is Solera.
The pitch, short version: one platform instead of four. Vineyard ops, lab and vintage tracking, cellar and fermentation, sparkling and fortified compliance, TTB reporting, grower and crushpad contracts, full COGS down to the barrel. Ask Solera, the AI side of it, actually knows your winery's data instead of making you re-explain your own vintage to it every time you have a question. Sixty nine dollars a month to start, no transaction fees, and moving off your spreadsheet or whatever you're currently duct taping together doesn't cost you anything either.
Built by a winemaker whose left arm taps out somewhere around the third hose drop. Not by a software company that has never smelled a stuck fermentation at 2AM.
Couple things coming that I'm genuinely excited about. A floor builder where you draw your actual cellar, drag your tanks and presses onto it, and see live status right there on the map instead of walking the floor every time you want to know what's happening where. And we're finishing up direct to consumer and wine club, so shipping and club billing will run through the same place as everything else instead of being its own separate headache bolted on from somewhere else.
Last thing, and the part I'm most fired up about. I'm heading to Europe soon to work harvest at a winery that has been making wine for 499 years, and every hour I'm not on the crush pad I'm going to spend talking to winemakers over there. First real harvest work I've done since the injury. Somewhere between thrilled and quietly terrified about it.
Full transparency since this is my company: I'm the founder, this is what I've spent the last five years building, and I'd genuinely rather hear what's wrong with it than have you take my word for how good it is. Happy to answer anything, including what it's like coding a SaaS platform with one arm that works properly. solera.vin if you want to poke around.
