LAS UVAS WINE TASTING
Las Uvas Wine Tasting was a conceptual project built as a web app for users to schedule in-home wine tasting experiences. This web app was built from scratch using React, Gatsby, Calendly, headless WordPress, and Netlify. With this project, I obtained my first foray into GraphQL and working with headless CMS APIs along with using the Gatsby framework.
Tech Stack
React
Gatsby
GraphQL
Wordpress
Calendly
Netlify
Project Purpose & Goal
This project was started as an ambitious business concept to bring Mexican wines to international tourists staying in private villas while on vacation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Many people visiting from outside of Mexico are often surprised to learn about Mexico’s fabulous wine country and its incredible wines. Using this web app, customers could select from 3 different tasting experiences - a basic wine & cheese tasting, a more in-depth small bites & wine tasting, or a full-blown 4-course wine pairing with a professional chef and sommelier. Customers would schedule their in-home tasting experience directly using the web app with the integrated Calendly appointment scheduling API.
Web Stack Explanation
This was my first web project using Jamstack architecture and honestly where I fell in love with the concept as a whole. I had been studying React and working on a Progressive Web App when I started learning more about Jamstack and its benefits. Therefore this project was purposefully built with the Gatsby framework because I felt that Gatsby provided a good base with lots of existing plugins available and great documentation from which to start this project. Gatsby also works pretty seamlessly with Netlify, which I had also chosen as my deployment platform. I deploy nearly all my sites using Netlify because it is fast, secure and, super intuitive to use without having to worry about a bunch of deployment obstacles. I chose to use headless WordPress as my CMS for this project as I had been using monolithic WordPress previously and I was curious as to how it would work as a headless option.
Lessons Learned
Headless WordPress is a whole other beast but I gained a lot of great experience customizing the content authoring experience using Advanced Custom Fields and creating Custom Post Types. I also dove further into database work and the webserver working with MySQL & Apache using MAMP for local development. Deploying everything live on our hosting platform (for the CMS) and Netlify (for the frontend UI) was also a learning challenge that provided me valuable insights. This was also my first experience with GraphQL and that was a fairly steep learning curve. I dove into learning how GraphQL queries work and hence how to best organize my content. Overall this was a great project and I had a lot of fun working with the different APIs and frameworks.