Client work
PourPlay — wine education built as play
Client work, designed and built by Riv Lux Media.
Wine education has a format problem. The material is genuinely interesting and the standard delivery — a course, a tasting mat, a glossary — asks for a commitment most people won't make for a drink they were going to buy anyway.
PourPlay teaches it as play instead: games and tastings, a points economy, and a reason to come back tomorrow.
What we built
A gamified wine-education platform where players learn food-and-wine pairing through play and earn PourPoints, collectable cards, and coupons for doing it. The reward layer is not decoration — it is the mechanism that converts a one-off visit into a habit, and the habit is what actually teaches.
Underneath it is the same catalog infrastructure that powers PairPlays: a real wine catalog with prices, ratings, and tasting notes, kept current with refresh tooling rather than manual edits.
The interesting design problem
Two audiences with different needs, one product.
Drinkers want to feel less lost in front of a wall of bottles. They need low-friction, low-jargon, and quick wins.
The business needs the platform to reach people at the moment they are actually choosing a bottle — which is a different design target entirely, and it is where a rewards economy earns its keep. Points, cards, and coupons make the platform useful precisely at the decision point rather than only during a lesson.
Serving both without letting the commercial layer swallow the educational one is the whole craft of the project.
What this demonstrates
Game mechanics applied to genuine education rather than bolted on for engagement metrics; a points-and-rewards economy that has to stay balanced and abuse-resistant; catalog data at scale, shared across products; and a platform that serves a consumer audience and a commercial one from the same build.
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