Winery maintenance best practices

Keeping equipment clean, compliant, and reliable in a winery requires consistent planning, smart scheduling, tight coordination, and the right tools. The best-run wineries treat maintenance as a strategic function — not just a reactive one. 

The following best practices will help your team reduce downtime, maintain sanitation standards, and extend the life of critical assets.

1) Schedule maintenance around production cycles

Wineries follow a natural rhythm: crush, fermentation, aging, bottling. Each stage puts different pressures on equipment and space, forcing maintenance to compete with production priorities.

To reduce disruption, schedule your most resource-intensive work — deep cleans, inspections, corrective repairs — during slower windows, such as post-harvest or between bottling runs. During busy seasons, stick to fast, low-risk tasks that can be slotted in without slowing production. You can also:

• Use production data to predict low-activity windows for PM work.
• Create maintenance blocks in your production calendar to protect time.
• Prioritize PMs for equipment that will be idle during specific phases.

With a little planning and foresight, maintenance becomes a supporting player — not a bottleneck — in your production flow.

2) Align maintenance with crew shift patterns

Many winery crews operate on rotating shifts, especially during harvest or bottling. Maintenance staff often overlap with cellar or production teams — or wear multiple hats. That makes visibility into labor availability essential.

Instead of relying on static calendars or guesswork, build your maintenance schedule around actual shift data. This allows you to:

• Visualize crew capacity across shifts and avoid overloading teams.
• Distribute tasks based on skill sets and availability, not just assumptions.
• Balance internal labor with seasonal help and contractor resources.

Smart scheduling respects your crew’s time and ensures critical work gets done — even when staffing is tight.

3) Prioritize cleaning and sanitation tasks

Sanitation isn’t just a food safety requirement — it’s a make-or-break factor for wine quality. Tanks, hoses, filters, barrels, and bottling lines all need regular, well-documented cleaning to prevent contamination from wild yeasts, bacteria, or chemical residues.

Treat these tasks as non-negotiable preventive maintenance. Use your scheduling system to assign, track, and confirm sanitation steps just as you would with mechanical inspections or repairs. Automating reminders and follow-ups ensures nothing gets skipped during busy periods or staff transitions.

4) Maintain environmental systems year-round

Fermentation and aging environments require stable temperatures and humidity. If glycol chillers or HVAC systems fail, you could lose a tank — or a vintage.

Rather than waiting for issues to surface, proactively maintain these systems by:

• Scheduling inspections ahead of seasonal transitions.
• Replacing air filters and checking sensors regularly.
• Calibrating temperature control systems before they’re heavily relied on.

A few hours of preventive work can protect months of careful winemaking.

5) Use a live schedule to coordinate across departments

In most wineries, maintenance competes with cellar work, production demands, lab tests, and deliveries — all in shared spaces. A bottling room might be in use for production all day, but is needed for equipment repairs overnight. Without visibility into each team’s plans, conflicts are inevitable.

A live, centralized maintenance schedule gives all departments more clarity on what’s happening, when, and where. By coordinating in advance, you reduce disruptions, avoid double-booking resources, and make sure essential maintenance gets done on time — without teams stepping on each other’s toes.

6) Track delay reasons and work history to improve reliability

Every time a job gets pushed or skipped, there’s a reason. Maybe a part wasn’t in stock, or production ran long. But unless those reasons are documented, the same issues will keep happening.

Make delay tracking part of your workflow by:

• Logging every delayed task with a reason code (e.g., labor, parts, production).
• Reviewing delays weekly or monthly to identify trends or bottlenecks.
• Using delay insights to refine your planning, scheduling, staffing, or inventory practices.

With better visibility into what’s holding you back, you can start making reliability gains that actually stick.