Wine compliance is the set of federal, state and local requirements a winery must meet to make, label, sell, ship and report on wine. It is six layers, each with its own regulator.
Before a winery can make or bottle wine it needs TTB approval to operate a bonded winery premises, filed through Permits Online, and a wine bond unless it qualifies for the exemption. TTB also requires production records — materials received and used, bulk wine, bottling, transfers in bond, taxpaid removals — kept for at least three years.
Operations are reported on the Report of Wine Premises Operations (TTB F 5120.17), filed annually, quarterly or semi-monthly depending on tax liability.
Outside Compliance Vine. TTB permits, bonds and operations reports are the winery's federal relationship; Compliance Vine does not file them.
Every label needs a Certificate of Label Approval (COLA, TTB F 5100.51) before the wine is bottled, and some products — flavoured or specially treated wines — need formula approval first. Wineries are also food facilities under the Bioterrorism Act and register with the FDA, renewing every two years.
Outside Compliance Vine. Label approval and FDA registration are handled directly with TTB and FDA, or through label counsel.
Still wine at 16% ABV or less is taxed at $1.07 per wine gallon when it is removed from bond, with higher rates for higher-alcohol, sparkling and carbonated wine. The Craft Beverage Modernization Act credits — $1.00 a gallon on the first 30,000 gallons, $0.90 on the next 100,000, $0.535 on the next 620,000 — were made permanent in December 2020, so most small and mid-sized producers pay far less than the headline rate. Returns go on TTB F 5000.24, on the same annual, quarterly or semi-monthly cadence as the operations report.
Outside Compliance Vine. Federal excise is a production-side tax, filed by the winery or its accountant. Compliance Vine works on the state taxes that attach to the sale.
A winery is licensed first in its own state. Every other state it wants to ship into directly is a separate decision: most require a direct-shipper permit with its own application, fee, renewal cycle and sometimes a bond or a product registration, and a few do not permit direct shipment at all. Which states are worth the licence is a cases-per-year question, not a legal one.
Compliance Vine handles this. The guide lists every state's permit, fee and renewal; the licensing calculator tells you the break-even; Compliance Vine tracks which licences you hold and flags orders into states where you hold none.
Once licensed, each state governs what a direct shipment must look like: how much one customer may receive in a month or a year, whether the carrier must be approved, that the package is marked as containing alcohol and delivered to an adult with signature, that age is verified, and whether the address is in a dry or restricted locality. These are the rules an order is checked against before it ships.
Compliance Vine handles this. This is Compliance Vine LIVE's job: six checks on every order — destination legality, licence status, cumulative volume, age verification, dry jurisdictions, carrier coverage — before fulfillment, with a signed decision record.
A direct shipment usually owes the destination state sales or use tax at the destination rate — often with local additions — and a state excise tax per gallon or per litre. Most states then want a shipment report listing what went where, on a monthly, quarterly or annual calendar, plus the sales-tax and excise returns themselves, and they set how long the records must be kept.
This is the layer that consumes the hours: the same order has to be resolved to the right jurisdiction, taxed, and then reported to several bodies in several formats.
Compliance Vine handles this. This is the Compliance Vine desktop app's job: it aggregates orders from every channel, resolves each to its tax jurisdiction and produces the submission-ready shipment, excise and sales-tax reports, with the audit trail behind them.