Website for a winery in Heidelberg-Rohrbach

A new website for a winery in Heidelberg

Rohrbach is Heidelberg's wine village: 52 of the city's 54 hectares of vines grow there. Right in the old village centre, on Weingasse, lies Weingut Hans Winter, documented since 1749 and now in its tenth generation with Hans Christian Winter, owner and cellar master in one. It has just been awarded three stars in the Eichelmann 2027.

I took care of the design and build of the new website, the photos, the vineyard map and the template for the online wine shop.

Web design from the label

The tone is set by the label, which was redesigned in 2025: a deep blue, cream and silver grey, Minion for names and grape varieties, a light sans serif for everything else. Embossed waves run across the label, standing for the Neckar, and its top edge rises like a wave. I recreated both from the print file: the wave now separates the sections of the page, and the pattern sits in the menu on mobile. And just like on the bottle, the logo hangs as an emblem in a blue box, here from the menu bar down over the film.

Tobias Schwerdt shot the film with a drone over the vineyards. I turned it into a loop without hard cuts and put as little as possible on top of it, just a gradient behind the text. Hans loves this film, so it shouldn't disappear behind blocks of colour.

It all started with three drafts. The family picked their favourite and added ideas from the other two, and that became the final design.

The estate's own vineyards on a cadastral map from 1880

The heart of the site is the map. The estate's best wines carry the name of their vineyard site on the label: Kessler, Klamm or Obere Unrechtshelden. These old field names already appear on the map of the Rohrbach district, surveyed in 1872 and published as a lithograph in 1880. The family's vineyards now sit on this map.

To do this, I located Hans's plot printouts on the official land parcels, trimmed them to today's site boundaries and converted them onto the old map. The old field names and the paths that were already drawn in back then served as reference points. Afterwards, Hans corrected the outlines himself.

On the page, the map stays in place as you scroll, and next to it each vineyard site has a card with a drone photo, soil, grape varieties and its wines. The map and cards highlight each other, and tapping a number jumps to the site. The large sites Herrenberg and Burg are deliberately not coloured in: other wineries have vines there too, and it would look as if it all belonged to the estate.

Photos of the cellar, the tasting room and the family

In October I took photos at the winery: the tasting room, the vaulted cellar with its wooden barrels, the tank cellar, Weingasse and the family. Hans made the selection himself, in a selection gallery where he could mark each photo for the website, for private use, as a maybe or as a no. You'll find the whole series under Photography.

The drone photos, the film and the cut-out bottles are by Tobias Schwerdt. Below the wine pyramid, his bottles stand free on the blue, true to scale: the slender Riesling bottle is a little taller than the Burgundy bottle next to it, just like on the shelf.

An online wine shop, prepared for Winestro

The online shop is being built by Winestro, a software package for wineries. So that it looks like the website, I first rebuilt it as a dummy in our design, the way Winestro structures it: age check, product groups, detail pages, basket and checkout. That turned into a design spec with ready-made CSS, header and footer, fonts and photos, which Winestro is taking on.

Until the shop is ready, the website runs without it. A toggle hides all links to the shop, and when the time comes, they can be restored in a single click.

Live since November 2026

I built the site with Astro from September 2026, and it's been live since 3 November. The pages are served pre-built from Cloudflare, the fonts come from the site's own domain, and Google Analytics only loads once someone consents.

Right at the top there's a slim banner that Hans asked for: it shows a current notice or, failing that, the next event, and clears itself away after the last day. Straight after the film, you can see whether the tasting room is open right now. The family sends us changes through their own client area.