The brief

The estate’s consumer surfaces had reached the point where a phone was the obvious place for them to come together: the festival companion — programme, masterclasses, exhibitors, hotels, partners — the award catalogue with ratings and favourites, and the business faces for buyers and producers. One app, one entry point, for the Merano WineFestival on 6–10 November 2026.

What it does

Anyone, without an account, gets the festival companion and the catalogue. Consumers rate wines, save favourites and build a taste profile. Buyers see their agenda and their matches. Producers see their participation and appointments, and can manage their showcase from the phone through the same platform routes their web area already uses — so nothing had to be built twice.

Offline first, and honest about it

The Kurhaus in Merano fills with up to 1,200 people on a festival day, and the network gives out. Everything the companion shows is cached on the device in SQLite; ratings and saves are queued and sent when a connection returns.

One rule shapes the whole design: an award that has not been announced is never shown, online or off. That is easy on a server and hard on a phone. The app treats award tiers as the one thing that may disappear when the network does, and neutral content as the thing that never does. An end-to-end test on a real device toggles airplane mode and asserts exactly that.

Built to be tested without the real thing

The screens run against a mock provider that can inject faults — outage, slow responses, throttling, expired sessions, partial data — so the failure modes are designed rather than discovered at the event.

Status

In build. Store submission is the next milestone; the marketing, support and privacy pages for it live on this site.