How to Get a TTB Winery Permit

Which permit does a winery actually need?

Most people starting a wine business need a bonded winery qualification, because it is the only one of the three that permits fermentation. The distinction between the three is about what you are allowed to do on the premises, not about size.

Two arrangements let you make wine without holding your own premises qualification. Under a custom crush agreement, a bonded winery produces wine for you under its own permit and remains responsible for all production records, reports, and taxes; you hold title to the fruit and receive finished wine. Under an alternating proprietorship, you qualify as a proprietor in your own right and take turns using another winery's premises and equipment, which means you file your own applications, keep your own records, and carry your own tax liability.

The choice matters more than it looks. Custom crush is far simpler administratively because someone else carries the compliance burden. Alternating proprietorship gives you your own permit, your own excise tax credit allowance, and the ability to build a permitted operating history, at the price of doing all the paperwork yourself.

Do you still need a wine bond?

Most small wineries do not, and this is the single biggest change to winery startup economics in the last decade. The Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes Act of 2015 removed the bond requirement for small producers effective January 1, 2017.

The threshold is $50,000. A winery that was liable for no more than $50,000 in federal excise tax in the preceding calendar year, and reasonably expects to be liable for no more than $50,000 in the current calendar year, is exempt from the requirement to hold a wine bond. For a winery paying the reduced effective rate available under the Craft Beverage Modernization Act, $50,000 covers a great deal of wine, which is why the exemption reaches most producers who would describe themselves as small.

New applicants indicate their eligibility during the Permits Online application, where TTB added a field for exactly this purpose. Existing permittees who now qualify request the exemption by amending their permit rather than simply cancelling the bond; the bond stays in force until TTB approves the amendment.

Wineries above the threshold still post a bond, and the amount is driven by expected excise tax liability. If you expect to cross $50,000, price the bond into the plan early, because it is a recurring cost rather than a one time filing fee.

What goes into the application?

The application is submitted through Permits Online and is less a single form than a package of information about the business, the people behind it, and the physical premises. Expect to supply the following.

Applications are most often delayed by incomplete ownership disclosure and by premises diagrams that do not clearly separate bonded from non-bonded space. Both are avoidable. Disclose every party with a controlling interest even where the relationship feels immaterial, and draw the bonded boundary as though a stranger has to walk it with your diagram in hand, because eventually one will.

Why the premises matters as much as the paperwork

Because TTB is approving a physical place, not just a business. The bonded premises is the area within which untaxpaid wine may legally exist, and everything about your future compliance obligations is anchored to that boundary.

This has consequences people do not anticipate. Wine moving out of the bonded area is a taxable removal, which makes the line between your cellar and your tasting room a tax boundary rather than an architectural one. Changing the boundary later, expanding into an adjacent unit, adding an offsite storage location, requires an amended application and approval before you use the new space. Sharing a building with another business means the diagram has to make the separation unambiguous.

Plan the boundary with the operation you expect to run in three years, not the one you are starting with. Amending is routine but it is not instant, and discovering mid harvest that your new tank pad sits outside the bonded area is a genuinely bad week.

How long does approval take?

It varies, and TTB publishes current processing statistics for original applications rather than a fixed service level. Applications to operate a production or manufacturing plant, which includes bonded wineries, generally take longer to review than other application types.

Rather than a number, plan around the structure of the wait. The clock starts when the application is complete, not when it is first submitted, so anything TTB has to come back and ask for resets your position. Application status is visible in Permits Online at any time, and the National Revenue Center will answer questions about a pending application by phone.

The scheduling consequence is that federal approval sits on the critical path of your first harvest. Fruit contracts, tank orders, and lease commitments made on the assumption of a quick approval are the most common way a first vintage becomes a custom crush arrangement by accident. Give the federal application a long runway, and start the state licensing process in parallel where the state allows it, since several states will not issue until the federal permit is in hand.

What obligations start the day you are approved?

All of them, immediately, and well before you sell a bottle. The permit is the beginning of an ongoing compliance relationship rather than a one time hurdle.

From the first day of operations you owe production records under the federal wine regulations: what fruit came in, what was added to it, what moved between vessels, what was bottled, what left the premises. Those records have to be kept for at least three years and produced on request. Periodic Reports of Wine Premises Operations on TTB Form 5120.17 are due whether or not you produced anything in the period, and a nil report is still a report. Excise tax returns on Form 5000.24 are due at whatever frequency your tax liability places you in, and the tax is triggered by removal from bond rather than by sale.

Label approval is a separate track handled before wine goes to market, with its own application and its own review time, and it is not covered by the premises permit at all.

The wineries that struggle are rarely the ones that failed to file. They are the ones that operated for a vintage on paper notebooks and text messages, then tried to reconstruct a defensible record of every addition and transfer when the first report came due. The records requirement is the actual obligation; the report is just where a subset of it surfaces.

Frequently asked questions

The permit is the easy part

Getting approved is a finite project with a defined end. What follows has no end: production records from the first ton, operations reports on a fixed cycle whether or not anything happened, excise returns triggered by removal rather than by sale, and a three year retention obligation running behind all of it. The bond exemption removed the biggest financial barrier to starting a winery, and in doing so it moved the real cost of compliance from a line item to an ongoing habit.

Solera's TTB Compliance module holds the bond and registry information the permit generates, and its production and cellar modules capture the additions, transfers, and removals that the records requirement is actually about, so the operating history exists as a byproduct of running the winery rather than as a reconstruction project in January.

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