There is a lot of what I call “connecting the dots” when it comes to winery records compliance. Two examples of those “compliance dots” are the grape weigh tags being created at wineries right now and the labels on the wines they will eventually become. Though one of these winery compliance items occurs at the beginning stage of a wine’s life and the other at the end, they are actually directly connected from a TTB regulation (& audit!) perspective.
My next winery harvest compliance FAQ video explains just how they are connected and what is in the best interest of winery staff to be recording on all those weigh tags (to plan ahead for their wine labels!) as harvest 2017 chugs on.
Does one need a weigh tag for wine made with estate fruit only?
Hi Bert- great follow up question! Here in CA the regulations require a weighmaster certificate to be completed for any load of grapes that are being purchased. For any winery that only uses grapes grown on property they own the answer in that scenario is that the winery still needs to have a “source document” for each load of grapes in their records to meet TTB requirements. They would need to create their own in house document for recording the details of each load of grapes that come in from their vineyards. On it they’d want to include fields such as date, tag number, vineyard name, varietal, appellation and tonnage amount.