Wine traceability: from purchase to bottle

Traceability means that for every bottle leaving your business you can show where the wine came from, what happened to it and who it went to. The Swiss wine trade control (SWK) checks this against your stock cards; the cantonal food inspectorate checks it against the flow of goods. This guide shows what both require and how to keep the chain closed in daily work.

Two legal bases, one chain

Wine ordinance. The SWK requires complete records across every stage of production, processing and distribution. At any time they must show:

• receipts and issues
• the names of suppliers and of trade buyers
• quantities by vintage, variety, product name and owner
• the single vineyard (Lage), if the wine is sold under one
• every change in volume from treatment, how the wine was used, and losses
• stock levels

Food law. Article 83 of the Swiss food ordinance (LGV) also requires you to be able to tell the canton which business you got a product from and which business you supplied it to — one step back, one step forward. Direct sales to consumers are exempt. In your shop you don't need to know every private customer; for restaurants and resellers you do.

The foundation: a complete wine designation

The chain most often breaks at the name. The SWK requires the designation in your records to be complete every time: product name, controlled designation of origin, vintage, grape variety and nominal volume, exactly as on the label. "Pinot Noir" is not enough; "Pinot Noir Graubünden AOC 2023 0.75 l" is. Each designation gets its own stock card — a new vintage is a new card, and so is the magnum.

The wine's path, step by step

1. Intake. If you press your own grapes, you keep a stock card for each grape lot based on the cantonal harvest sheet (Kellerblatt): owner, wine designation, product name, grape variety, harvest weight in kg and date. For a blend (Assemblage), each variety is recorded with its quantity. After pressing, you enter the litres obtained.

2. Treatment and blending. Enrichment, vinification losses and filtration change the volume and are booked. A blend is an issue on the card of the wine given and a receipt on the card of the wine receiving it. The right to blend belongs to whoever first took the wine into the cellar; a buyer may only blend if that right was transferred in writing on the invoice. As soon as you work on bulk wine, you also keep a cellar book or work reports.

3. Storage in tanks. Each cellar has a list of vessels with the number and capacity of each one. Tanks and barrels are labelled with their contents and full wine designation and have a measuring device.

4. Bottling. The litres bottled are an issue on the bulk-wine card, and the number of bottles is a receipt on the card for that nominal volume. Filling losses are booked separately.

5. Buying bottled wine. Every goods receipt needs a supplier invoice. For imports you add the customs assessment and proof of origin — the electronic accompanying document (e-VD) from the EU, otherwise a certificate of origin such as the VI-1. Keep these documents together per transaction.

6. Storage and sale. Bottled wine is stored by variety and vintage, with third-party stock and own consumption kept apart and marked. Every sale, gift and breakage is an issue with date, customer, document number and quantity. Sales may be booked in totals if a supporting list proves the individual sales.

Documents that match

The link between the stock card and reality is the document number. The SWK requires consecutively numbered documents whose number appears on the stock card, filed chronologically and alphabetically and kept for ten years. Filing by payment date is not accepted: the inspector looks things up by invoice number, date or customer.

What Vinosoft records without gaps

From the bottle onwards, in every account:

• Articles with a full designation. Every wine is an article with vintage, size, producer, SWK code and an optional lot number. Each size and each vintage is its own article — just as the stock card requires. See Create and manage articles.
• Goods in with the supplier. A purchase order books the bottles into the chosen storage location with the order number and supplier name.
• Goods out with the customer. Delivery notes, invoices, till sales and webshop orders book stock out as sales, with document number and customer. Credit notes book returns back in.
• Storage locations. Cellar, shop and outside warehouse are separate storage locations with their own stock.
• The stock card at a click. The movement log shows every booking per article with date, text, quantity and running balance, filtered by period or storage location. Movements created by documents can't be deleted.

From the grape lot onwards, with the cellar bookkeeping module:

• Intake. Every grape lot with harvest sheet number, canton, grape variety, origin, harvest weight in kg, owner, vessel and must weight, with its own kilogram ledger.
• Pressing. One or more grape lots become one bulk wine; you record the measured yield in litres.
• Blending. Several source wines from their vessels go into a target wine — as an issue and a receipt on the respective stock cards.
• Bottling. Litres out of the bulk wine, bottles into the bottle article of the same wine, filling loss separately. All rows share one document number.
• Vessels. The vessel register knows every tank and barrel by number, type and capacity. A vessel holds either grapes or wine, and bottles belong in a storage location. QR labels open the vessel on a phone, with contents, fill level, recent movements and analyses.
• Stock cards. Per bulk wine and per bottle size, with date, reason, document number, counterparty, receipts, issues and balance. You attach documents directly to the row.

If the food inspectorate asks which restaurants received a particular vintage, filter the movement log by that article and read the customers from the bookings.

Where the limits are

The cellar bookkeeping module is switched on per account. Without it, you keep the bulk-wine side on the SWK's stock cards or in a cellar book, and book the wine into Vinosoft once it is bottled. The SWK explicitly allows this split as long as the hand-over is clean: the bottles produced according to the bulk-wine card and the first receipt in Vinosoft carry the same quantity and date.

You record the right to blend as a note on the blend; Vinosoft does not check whether you hold it. A lot number is a detail on the article, not separate stock per lot — if you need to trace several bottlings of the same vintage separately, create one bottle article per bottling. Vineyard parcels are not a record of their own; the single vineyard (Lage) is a text field on the wine.

Checklist

• Every wine designation complete; every vintage and size its own article
• Every receipt with supplier and document; every issue with customer and document
• Import documents filed together per transaction
• Third-party stock, own consumption and stock for sale kept apart and labelled
• Hand-over from bulk wine to bottles booked with the same quantity and date
• Documents kept for ten years and findable by number

How it all feeds into the annual report is in The SWK stock report due 31 January; the overview is on Cellar bookkeeping.

Sources: SWK guidance "Kellerbuchhaltung Produktion und Handel" and "Kellerbuchhaltung Flaschenhandel", Art. 83 LGV (SR 817.02), as of October 2026. This guide is not legal advice.