Quick answer
- A wine card is a curated selection of wines plus the settings that decide how it is presented.
- Work in this order: Items, then Manage Categories, then Save, then Generate PDF, then Set active.
- One QR code per wine card, and it always opens whichever PDF is currently active.
Where each thing is controlled
Wine cards are configured across three places, which is the most common source of confusion.
| You want to change | Go to |
|---|---|
| Which wines are on the card, categories, colours, layout, PDF, QR | Wine Cards, this guide and Wine card display settings |
| Whether one wine is a house wine, recommended, spotlight, or by the glass | Edit wine, Wine Card tab, see Per-wine wine card settings |
| The look of the guest-facing tablet view | The mobile app's own settings, see The digital wine card |
Creating a card
Create a new wine card, or duplicate an existing one when you want the same styling with a different selection. Duplicating is almost always faster than configuring a second card from scratch.
Cards are owned by your organization and belong to a venue, or to the whole organisation. On multi-site accounts the card's settings have a Venue field; a new card starts on your active venue. The venue decides what the card works with: the stock counts you see, the wines offered in the picker (with a switch to show only wines stocked at that venue), the prices printed on the card and the published PDF. This follows the card's own venue, not the venue you have active while editing. A digital wine card must belong to a venue.
Two limits apply. Your plan sets how many wine cards you may have, 3 on Free, 5 on Professional, 10 on Premium and unlimited on Enterprise, and the page itself caps the list at 10 cards regardless of plan. See Tier entitlements and plan limits.
If a card is shared, everyone sees your edits. When you open a card that other people in your organization can also reach, Vinius says so at the top. There is no personal draft copy. Duplicate it first if you want to experiment.
Choosing the wines
The Items tab is the selection. Filter the catalogue by country, region or style, or exclude ageing wines, then select the wines you want. Select all and deselect all work on the current filter, not the whole catalogue.
Three things are worth understanding here.
Out of stock does not mean removed. A selected wine that is out of stock stays selected. Whether it appears on the card depends on the Include Out of Stock setting. When that setting is off, the wine shows a Not on card badge and returns automatically once it is restocked. You never need to re-add it. A summary line tells you how many selected wines are currently in that state, and Show only out of stock isolates them.
Changing the selection does not update the categories. Add or remove wines and your existing categories still describe the old selection. Go to Manage Categories and regenerate. Vinius prompts you when this is needed.
Missing data becomes visible gaps. A readiness summary counts the selected wines that are missing something the card displays: price, vintage, region or grapes. Show only incomplete narrows the list to those wines, and Review wines takes you to fix them. Nothing blocks you from exporting, but a wine with no price prints as an empty space.
Categories
Categories are the structure your guests read, and they drive both the PDF and the digital wine card.
Generate builds them from your current selection and your grouping choices. Regenerate rebuilds them after the selection changes. Category hierarchy follows the primary and secondary grouping set in the display settings.
- Drag to reorder. Secondary categories can only move within their parent.
- Manual ordering survives regeneration. Reordering by hand is not thrown away next time you regenerate.
- The eye icon hides a category from the output without deleting it.
- Start New Page forces a category to begin on a fresh page in the PDF.
- Click a category name to expand or collapse its subcategories, or use the expand and collapse buttons for all of them at once.
The four special categories
House Wines, Recommended Wines, Glass Prices and Large Bottles behave differently from grouping categories. They collect wines by a property rather than by geography or style, and they organise their contents by style as subcategories automatically.
Their names are editable under Custom Category Headers in the settings, so "Large Bottles" can read "Grote Formaten" or "Magnums and above" without touching anything else.
House Wines and Recommended Wines are filled from the per-wine flags described in Per-wine wine card settings, not from this page.
Automatic regeneration
Some setting changes make your categories wrong immediately, for example switching the primary grouping. Vinius updates them for you and tells you: categories were updated to match your change, save to keep it, or undo. Read that toast rather than dismissing it, because undo is only offered once.
Saving
Save before exporting. Unsaved list or category edits are not guaranteed to reach a generated PDF.
If you navigate away with unsaved changes, Vinius stops you and offers Save & Continue or Discard Changes. There is no autosave.
Previewing
Two previews serve different purposes:
- The live preview updates as you change settings. Use it for layout and colour decisions.
- Exact Preview (Page 1) renders page 1 through the real PDF engine, including unsaved changes, and is not stored in your PDF history. Use it as the final check before generating, especially after changing paper size, density or fonts.
PDF and QR
The PDF & QR tab manages published output.
- Generate PDF builds the card. Large lists take a while.
- Set active with the star. The active PDF is what guests get.
- Share the QR code or the public URL.
Points that catch people out:
- There is one QR code per wine card, not one per PDF. It always resolves to the currently active PDF, so reprinting table cards after every menu change is unnecessary. Generate the new PDF, set it active, and the existing QR code now serves it.
- The QR code does nothing until a PDF is active. Set one with the star first.
- The active PDF cannot be deleted. Set another one active first.
- You can upload a PDF you produced elsewhere, up to 10MB, and set that active instead.
- Maximum 10 PDFs per wine card. Delete an old one to generate a new one.
- Guests do not sign in. The public link and the QR code both open the active PDF directly.
Be careful deleting a card or a PDF that guests are actively using. Neither action asks whether the QR codes on your tables point at it.