Katie Jones makes wine from old-vine parcels scattered around Tuchan and Paziols, in French Catalan country. Originally from Ashby de la Zouch, she moved south more than twenty years ago, spent sixteen years at the local Mont Tauch co-operative, then went out on her own: an ancient vineyard in the Maury Valley in 2008, a first vintage in 2009, and a Grenache trophy and an International Wine Challenge silver almost immediately after.
The vines are the point. Old Grenache Gris, Carignan, Carignan Gris, Macabeu and Lledoner Pelut, low-yielding and hard to work. The kind of vines that get uprooted the moment they stop making economic sense. Keeping them in the ground is the whole business.
The winemaker people turn up for
In March 2013, while Katie was away at a trade fair, someone walked into the winery and opened the taps on two vats. The entire vintage of Jones Blanc, made from eighty-year-old Grenache Gris, ran out onto the floor. She bought rosé from a neighbour, made a wine out of the wreckage and called it Après la Pluie.
What happened next is the thing worth understanding about this business. Her customers, and the Naked Wines Angels who backed her, pre-ordered thirty thousand bottles in forty-eight hours to put her back on her feet. This is not a producer with a mailing list. It is a producer with people who feel involved, and who show up when it counts.
An idea no software could hold
Adopt an Old Vine gives those people something to hold onto. Launched in 2021, it lets a customer choose an individual vine online, name it, and pay to keep it going. They get a certificate, a photo magnet, a keyring, and a numbered tag tied to their vine, so they can walk up the hill and stand in front of it. It renews each year. People come and visit.
It is a lovely idea. It is also nothing like the thing e-commerce software means by "a subscription". An adopted vine is an individual, named, physical thing in a specific row on a specific hillside, attached to a person, renewing on its own schedule, with a parcel of keepsakes going out at the start. It is not a case of wine on repeat.
WooCommerce ran the shop, and a shop is all it was ever going to run. Adopting a vine was never going to fit inside it: not as a product, not as a subscription plugin, not as any combination of the two bolted together and nursed along. The idea existed before the software that could carry it did.
“We made the switch from WooCommerce to a custom solution powered by Marzipan. Managing our orders is a breeze and the flexibility of the subscriptions API has allowed us to enhance our old vine adoptions offering.”
So we built it with her
Domaine Jones was the first winery to use Marzipan. Adopt an Old Vine launched on it, and to a real extent much of Marzipan's subscriptions engine flexibility because of what the scheme needed: recurring relationships that are not simply a case of wine every quarter, tied to individual records, renewing on their own terms.
That is the opposite of how buying software usually goes. Rather than trimming the idea down until it fitted the tool, the tool got built around the idea, with the person who had it in the room. She did not adopt a platform and hope. She described what she wanted to do, and it got made.
The ordinary things became ordinary at the same time: orders, subscriptions and customers in one system, e-labels for the range, tax worked out by where the customer is. Nothing to reconcile, nothing to bolt on.
The result
Adopt an Old Vine keeps running, the wine keeps going out, and Katie is not the integration layer holding the two together. The old vines she is trying to keep in the ground now help pay for themselves, through a scheme that exists in the shape she imagined it, on a platform that was built to carry it.