How a wine newsletter became software
Weinnotes started in July 2019 as a weekly story about one Oregon winery and the people behind it. Five years of tastings, pickup parties and podcast interviews put A.J. Weinzettel behind the curtain of how tasting rooms actually run.
What he kept seeing was wineries paying too much for reservation systems that were built for restaurants, then patched to fit a wine flight. A.J. had spent his career writing software, so he started sketching something better, and talking to wineries one on one before writing a line of code.
The name comes from the vineyard. Every estate has that one block, the parcel everyone talks about, where the best fruit comes from. Block 55 launched in early 2024 and now works with wineries in 13 states.
My goal with Block 55 is to enable wineries to deliver “unreasonable” levels of hospitality to their guests.
— A.J. Weinzettel, in the May 2025 Weinnotes newsletter