There is a type of wine business that until recently I had only read about on the TTB’s (Alcohol & Tobacco Tax & Trade Bureau) website. They are called taxpaid wine bottling houses, or TPWBH on their TTB permits instead of BWN’s or BWC’s. What are they and what do they do you ask?

First for some background we need to back up a little to an earlier stage in the winemaking process. After bottling, when a wine reaches the cased goods stage and then is shipped out for sale is when the federal excise taxes are required to be paid. Wineries can either opt to pay these taxes on all cases bottled of a wine blend immediately after the bottling is completed or by groups of shipments as they occur.

In either case taxpaid wine, at least in the eyes of the feds is just that, wines that federal excise taxes have been paid on.

So a taxpaid wine bottling house is a TTB permitted site that only deals with wine that has already has the federal excise tax paid on it. These facilities receive the wine in either as cased goods or as bulk and then have a limited number of options available to them for processing and treating it before either bottling it or sending it back out as bulk.

Holders of this type of TTB permit do have somewhat less recordkeeping to maintain, primarily because they don’t have to file the monthly report (“702”) and of course no excise tax forms to file either. They are required to obtain label approvals (COLAs) for any wines they bottle.

So what would the appeal be of this type of wine business? Basically this is another avenue for those wanting to get into the wine business who aren’t interested in the more traditional route of growing and making wine.

They instead want to create and market a wine brand, or brands but just not to the extent of buying grapes, fermenting and storing the finished product and all of the other infrastructure that goes along with being a winery owner. This option allows them to start a wine business with much less potential wait time to be ready to actually begin selling their finished product too, an aspect that will also have appeal for many wine business enthusiasts.

This type of wine business does require an ABC (state) license as well as the TTB (federal) permit.