Ask ten producers for a technical sheet and you get ten beautiful PDFs. Ask ten importers what they do with them, and the answer is the same every time: they open it, copy four values into their own system, and email you for the six that were missing.
The mismatch is structural. Tech sheets are designed as marketing artefacts and used as data sources. If you build yours for the second job, the first still works — and the follow-up emails stop.
What an importer is actually extracting
Watch the copy-paste and a pattern appears. Buyers pull the sheet apart into four blocks, and only one of them is the one producers spend their time on.
1. Identity
The name as it will appear on a price list, the producer, the appellation or geographical indication, the vintage, the colour and style, and the grape varieties with percentages. Percentages matter more than they look: several markets require the blend composition for a listing, and “predominantly Touriga Nacional” is not a percentage.
2. Analysis
Alcohol to one decimal place, total acidity, pH, residual sugar, total SO₂, and for some markets volatile acidity. These are the numbers that end up on customs paperwork and in retailer databases, and they are wine-and-bottling specific, not brand-specific.
Round them the way the label rounds them. If the label says 13.5% vol and the sheet says 13.42%, someone will have to decide which one to type, and they will ask you.
3. Logistics
This is the block that is missing most often, and the one that stalls a listing:
- bottle format and filling volume;
- closure type;
- bottle weight — increasingly asked for on its own, because of packaging reporting obligations;
- case configuration: bottles per case, case dimensions and weight;
- pallet configuration: cases per layer, layers per pallet, total bottles;
- EAN or GTIN per bottle, and per case if you have one;
- customs code (HS / Taric).
None of it is glamorous, and all of it is required before a wine can be quoted, shipped or shelved.
4. Story
Vineyard, soils, yields, harvest notes, vinification, ageing, tasting note, awards, food pairing. The part most producers write first. It sells the wine to the buyer’s customers — but the buyer cannot list the wine on it.
The three failures that generate the most email
The vintage lives only in the filename. TechSheet_Reserva_2022_FINAL_v3.pdf
gets renamed on the way into someone’s shared drive, and now you have an
analytical sheet with no year on the page. Put the vintage in the document, at
the top, next to the name.
The alcohol on the sheet and the alcohol on the label disagree. Usually because the sheet was written from the pre-bottling analysis and the label was printed from the final one. The importer has to reconcile two official-looking numbers, and the only way to do that is to ask you.
One sheet, several bottlings. A wine bottled in 0.75, magnum and bag-in-box is three sets of logistics data behind one set of analytical values. Sheets that try to cover all three in a footnote get misread. Either give each format its own sheet, or make the format table unmistakable.
Language is a data problem, not a translation problem
An importer in Italy wants the sheet in Italian. One in France wants it in French. Most producers solve this by keeping a folder of translated PDFs, which works exactly until an analysis is revised — at which point four documents need editing and, in practice, two of them get it.
The values themselves do not need translating. 13.5% vol, 5.8 g/L, pH 3.42
are the same in every language. What needs translating is the labels around them
and the story block. That is a strong argument for holding the sheet as
structured data with a translation layer on top, rather than as four independent
documents that happen to be related.
Generate the sheet, don’t maintain it
The version of your Reserva sheet sitting in an importer’s inbox is a snapshot of the day you sent it. If the sheet is a file you edit, every correction is a re-send and a hope that they use the new one.
If the sheet is generated from the product record, the correction happens in one place and every future export is right. Better still, a buyer who has access to the record does not need the PDF at all — they read the current values, and the question of which version they hold stops existing.
That is the design behind product sheets in Drinksbase: one record per wine and vintage, holding identity, analysis, logistics and story, from which the PDF, the e-label page and the catalogue entry are all derived. Whether or not you use us, the principle stands. A technical sheet should be a view of your data, not a copy of it.
A checklist to hold your sheets against
- Wine name, producer, appellation, vintage and colour, all on the page.
- Grape varieties with percentages that add to 100.
- Alcohol, total acidity, pH, residual sugar, total SO₂ — consistent with the label.
- Bottle format, closure, bottle weight.
- Case and pallet configuration, with counts and dimensions.
- EAN per bottle, and per case if applicable.
- Customs code.
- Allergen and ingredient information, or a link to the e-label carrying it.
- A tasting note that reads like a person wrote it.
- A date or version on the document, so an old copy identifies itself as old.
