01 / 04 · Wine · Catalogue2025

amka.is

A wine catalogue and a guide to wine and food pairing.

Overview

Amka is an Icelandic wine importer. The site is purely a catalogue, around a hundred wines with producer notes, region, food pairing and ABV, no prices and no checkout. Purchases happen through Vínbúðin; the site is the information layer. It ships in three languages (Icelandic, English, Polish) and is now live at amka.is.

Wine · Catalogue

Problem

The previous site ran on with that earned its complexity nowhere, no sale ever happens on the site, but the stack stayed heavy, slow, and hard for non-developers to maintain. compliance was bolted on the side rather than baked in.

Approach

Lean with , and ; the catalogue lives in with , images in . The site ships in three languages (Icelandic, English, Polish) with per-wine translations. The admin area uses a rich-text editor with drag-and-drop ordering, image uploads auto-resize to 1200 px, two-factor is mandatory on every admin, and revalidates instantly on save. A bespoke chatbot, Evín, the wine advisor, grounded in the full catalogue via over and , sits inside the site as a shortcut for visitors, and a party-wine calculator (Veisluvínsreiknivél) works out how many bottles an event needs. Certifications and awards render as factual badges on each wine.

Outcome

A fast public site with product schema, dynamic and a -compliant cookie consent layer. Amka staff manage the wines themselves; nobody has to ship a deploy to add a new vintage.

The wine advisor

Delighted

Evín is AMKA's wine advisor, a bespoke chatbot that lives inside their site. Powered by Anthropic Claude (Sonnet 5) and a RAG database of the whole catalogue, he knows every wine, recommends bottles and tells you what pairs with your meal. He speaks Icelandic, English and Polish.

Grounded in the full catalogue at amka.is, over a hundred wines from different producers and countries. Ask “which red goes with lamb” and Evín replies with direct citations to the wines on the list and opens the relevant product page.

He's always a little alive: breathing, blinking, and shifting expression to match the conversation. Click a mood below to play it on the avatar.

Now: Delighted · a wide smile on a good pairing

Key features

01Trilingual site (Icelandic, English, Polish) with per-wine translations
02Server-side filtering by country, category and food pairing
03Admin with rich-text editor and drag-and-drop ordering
04Image uploads auto-resize to 1200 px on save
05Mandatory two-factor on every admin account
06 with instant revalidation on save
07 (Product, ItemList, BreadcrumbList) and dynamic
08Twenty-one bespoke food-pairing icons
09Certification and award badges on each wine (no critic scores)
10Bespoke chatbot, Evín, the wine advisor, grounded in the catalogue
11Party-wine calculator (Veisluvínsreiknivél) for event planning

Security

01Mandatory two-factor on every admin account
02Row-level security () on every table
03 hosted in the EU, data stays within Europe
04-compliant cookie consent (four categories)
05 key isolated to the production environment
06Cookieless first-party analytics ( Analytics)
07No personally identifiable data shared with third parties

SEO

01 product schema (Product, ItemList, BreadcrumbList)
02 images per page via
03 with instant revalidation on every admin save
04Auto-generated sitemap.xml and robots.txt
05Correct on every wine page
06Server-rendered for a fast first contentful paint
07Searchable by country and food pairing

Performance

01Google PageSpeed gives amka.is full marks for speed on desktop. The page appears in under a second and nothing shifts around as it loads.
02Best practices and are at the top too, with accessibility just behind.