Blog
Tanks a lot……
The use of stainless steel tanks in the winemaking process first began in the 1950’s and besides the ever popular use of wood in the form of wine barrels is still the most common storage vessel seen at a winery. They have many advantages over other types of containers, leakage for one and temperature control for another. […]
Becoming Fluent in Government-Speak
As an industry, wineries have been regulated by the federal government since the early days of US history. From the beginning stages of building a winery, through the stages of making wine and eventually to the finished product being shipped out to its customers wineries are required to set up and maintain many applications, records […]
How to become a wine label detective
The route to discovering if a wine is made by a custom crush client which is an individual or business that has qualified as a wholesaler but does not own their own physical winery or whether it was made by an actual winery can be dug up via a web search using the TTB’s public […]
So you want to get into the wine business?
There are currently over 6,000 wineries, both real and virtual in the US. (You may be wondering just what is a virtual winery? More on that later.) There are currently four options available for getting into this growing industry for those who have the desire.
Can a custom crush client use estate bottled on their label?
There are many terms used on wine labels for the purpose of telling a story about the wine as well as many that are used for definite marketing purposes. In the case of the term estate bottled just the statement itself tends to have a certain image of higher quality, even to the consumer who […]
To database or not to database?
In my years of working at several wineries of different sizes, I have had the wonderful opportunity to design, set up and maintain a database tracking software system for several of them. This was a wonderful experience for many reasons, the main one being the satisfaction that comes from assembling an effective system that manages […]
No, it’s not that kind of cola…….
You may have heard of the term “cola” used frequently in the wine industry around wine labels. Perhaps you thought, what does soda have anything to do with wine? Do soda drinkers also tend to be wine enthusiasts? Is is a descriptor term in some way? None of these are the case. The acronym COLA […]
Wine Label 101 Class
Calling all Lovers of Grapes! We’re excited to announce our next education opportunity coming up through Napa Valley Community Education. It is our Wine Label 101 class! This is an extremely informative and interactive class guaranteed to forever change your perspective on wine labels! Make shopping for wine fun and interactive! Ever get overwhelmed when […]
Vineyard Designation on A Wine Label
The next “non-required” item to cover on our list is the use of what are called vineyard designations on wine labels. This is when an actual existing vineyard site/property is named on a label, such as the Rosenblum example here. It lists Monte Rosso Vineyard as the “vineyard designate” of this wine. The TTB requirements […]
Appellation of Origin
Napa Valley, North Coast, Sierra Foothills, Rockpile, Wild Horse Valley…….and the list goes on. What are all of these? As I referred to in my last blog post, they are all established AVAs. (American Viticultural Areas) The item I’m covering in this posting in our ongoing discussion of non-required label items is appellation of origin. […]
Vintage: Next non-required label item
What vintage is that wine? This has long been another way of asking what year (or age) is the wine. Though this is also commonly seen on wine labels it is our second example of an item not required by the TTB to appear. However when wineries do choose to include it the minimum percentage […]
Varietals: a “Non-required” label item
Now that we’ve taken a closer look at the items that are actually required to be on all wine labels, lets go into the next level and review another group: Commonly seen label items. Each of these items we’ll be taking a closer look at are not required to appear on a wine label, however […]
Net Contents
The TTB requires all alcoholic beverages to have a net contents statement. They also require this statement to be in metric amounts, and very specific metric amounts by the container’s volume. For example the most common bottle size we used to seeing holds 750 milliliters, and is required to be identified as that specific metric […]
Sulfite Statement
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 Sulfite Statement The next item in our list of label items is a required one, the sulfite statement. This became a required item on all wine labels on January 9, 1987 for wines containing more than 10 parts per million of sulfur dioxide. This item’s appearance came about in large part […]
Name and address
Our next item is referred to as the Name and address, or bottling statement. This required item can appear on either the front or back label and refers to the details about who either bottled or imported the wine. The TTB’s most specific and bare minimum requirements for it are three items; either the phrase […]
