Project
Wine Decoded
A WooCommerce store and custom wine search for a catalogue of nearly 2,000 bottles
Wine Decoded is a Melbourne wine business run by Paul Kaan, a winemaker who studied at Roseworthy and made wine in the Yarra Valley, Margaret River, Burgundy and Champagne before turning to retail. It sells wine from around the world through a members-only community that is free to join, and it is a shop, a magazine and a wine school in the one site. I have looked after that site since 2019.
Project Scope
- Custom WordPress theme
- WooCommerce store development
- Wine search and filter system
- Product data feeds
- Dedicated server hosting
- Ongoing maintenance and development
The challenge
A wine list this size is a browsing problem before it is anything else. There are close to 1,900 wines in stock at any one time, from more than 300 producers across more than 200 regions, and hardly any of it is the sort of thing a shopper recognises on sight. Someone after a Nebbiolo from Piedmont under a certain price has a very specific question in mind. A category page listing 1,241 red wines does not answer it, and neither does a search box that only matches words in the title.
The second problem is quieter. This store is the business rather than a brochure for it, so it cannot stop taking orders. Hosting, updates, backups and the speed of the response when something breaks matter every bit as much as the design does.
What I built
A custom WordPress theme and a WooCommerce store, with a search and filter system written specifically for the way people shop for wine rather than the way shop software assumes they do.
Filters built around wine
Seven ways to narrow the list: variety, region, vintage, producer, price, bottle size and closure. Results and the count update instantly with no page reload, and every filter applied shows as a chip that can be taken off again on its own.
Regions the way wine is organised
Region runs three levels deep, country to region to sub region, so a shopper can start at Italy and finish at Barolo. The same structure drives the main menu and the links on every product, which keeps the navigation and the filters telling the same story.
Case pricing shown up front
Buying three or six of something costs less per bottle, and the tile and the product page both say so before anything goes in the cart. The rules are set once per category in the admin, so a new offer does not mean retyping prices across hundreds of products.
Listed where wine buyers already look
The catalogue publishes a daily feed to Wine-Searcher, the comparison site serious buyers use to hunt down a particular bottle. It puts the store in front of people who are searching for the wine rather than for a shop, and it runs itself.
Across the site
The wine list, filtered and counted live
A single wine on a phone
The result
The search and filter system went live in July 2026 and has been tuned since against what members actually do with it, not what anyone assumed they would. Every filter interaction is tracked in Google Analytics, so the next round of changes starts from evidence rather than opinion.
Underneath it, the store moved onto a dedicated server in 2025 and sits behind daily offsite backups, monitoring and alerting, and a bot filtering layer that keeps scrapers off the catalogue. None of that is visible to a customer, which is rather the point. The difference between a shop that feels quick and one that feels tired is usually something nobody sees.
If you sell online and your catalogue has outgrown what the shop software does on its own, that is the work I do. See how I approach WooCommerce development and WordPress hosting and maintenance, read about the MDT DESIGN jewellery store, or get in touch.
Common questions about this project
By filtering on the things a wine buyer actually has in mind: grape variety, region, vintage, producer, price, bottle size and closure. Results update instantly, the filters already applied stay visible so they can be removed one at a time, and the result count updates as you go. A shopper narrows a list of 1,900 bottles down to a handful without ever loading a new page.
Yes, with work. WooCommerce is comfortable with the orders, the products and the payments. What it is not built for is filtering thousands of items seven different ways at once, because every combination a shopper picks turns into more work for the database. This store gets around that by preparing the search data ahead of time and doing the filtering in the browser, so the wine list stays quick no matter how many filters are on.
Off the shelf filter plugins treat every option as a flat list of tick boxes. Wine does not work that way. Region is a hierarchy that runs country to region to sub region, vintages need sorting by year with the non vintage bottles kept out, and price is a slider rather than brackets. A plugin can be bent into most of that, but the result is slower and harder to change than building the thing the store actually needs.
Hosting on a dedicated server, WordPress core and plugin updates, daily offsite backups, monitoring and alerting, security and bot filtering, plus the development work as the business asks for new things. For a store that takes orders every day, the maintenance is not a nice extra. It is what keeps the shop open.
Yes. I am based in Geelong, about an hour from Melbourne, and work with clients across Australia. Retail eCommerce suits the way I work because the website is the shopfront, so every change to it shows up in the numbers.
Since 2019. The store has been rebuilt, extended and moved between hosts over that time, and the search and filter system is the most recent large piece of work. A relationship that long is worth mentioning, because it is the real test of a build: not whether it launched, but whether it was still a good decision seven years later.
