International guests
Which languages does your winery website really need?
Choose website languages around your actual visitors, enquiries and capacity to keep information accurate.
Start with guests, not a list of flags
Your winery website needs the languages that help the people you can realistically serve. Start with the estate's own language, then use actual enquiries, tasting visitors and commercial priorities to decide what comes next. English can be useful for international visitors, but it is not automatically the only additional language worth considering.
Review the questions received over a season. Which visitors struggle to understand the tasting arrangements? Which export relationships are you developing? A priority market and a large volume of casual website visits are not necessarily the same thing.
Translate a complete visitor journey
For each chosen language, cover the introduction, wines, visit details, contact form and confirmation messages. A translated homepage that leads to an untranslated booking form leaves the most important part of the journey unfinished.
Use a glossary for estate names, appellations, grape varieties and technical terms. Preserve proper names where appropriate and have somebody competent in the language check nuance. Machine translation can help prepare a draft, but should not be the final authority for practical or technical information.
Give each language a stable home
Google recommends separate URLs for different language versions. For example, an estate might use /fr/visiter and /en/visit. Its guidance also describes hreflang annotations to indicate corresponding language versions. These help explain the relationship between pages; they do not guarantee search rankings.
Make the language choice visible and do not rely solely on automatic redirection. Google warns that language-based rerouting can prevent some versions from being discovered. A visitor should be able to choose a language and share the address of that version.
Keep promises consistent across languages
Do not translate 'tastings available by request' into wording that sounds like daily opening. Keep prices, opening arrangements and the distinction between an enquiry and a confirmed booking consistent. If the team cannot reply in a particular language, explain the available communication options.
Assign responsibility for updates. When a tasting changes, all published versions need the same review. A basic change log with the affected pages and languages is often enough to prevent one version from quietly becoming outdated.
Choose the next language deliberately
For an illustrative estate receiving regular German-language enquiries, German visit and contact information might be more valuable than several new languages chosen without evidence. For another estate developing French trade relationships, the priorities could differ.
Start with a manageable set, check that every route works and expand when there is a clear reason. Judge the result by the clarity of enquiries and the ability to serve visitors, alongside any search data you have. Language coverage is a service decision as well as a visibility decision.