Filing initial licenses to produce wine, recording ongoing production information, creating compliant labels for bottles and paying excise taxes—documentation for these and more is required by federal and state agencies. And there are penalties if a winery gets it wrong or sends it after the deadline.
Wine Compliance Alliance has been guiding wineries through this maze for 16 years, and is now launching a 2026 webinar series to train winery staff to do it themselves.
CEO and Founder, Ann Reynolds, will create and conduct each of the 10 live webinars, transferring her more than 30 years of experience in ensuring that winery filings are well-organized, accurate and submitted on time.
“I had to learn it the hard way,” Reynolds says, “I didn’t have anyone to ask, no one had the answers, so I learned it piece by piece.”
Wine Compliance Alliance has worked with many wineries to manage their wine production application files and reporting, specifically for TTB and the three California agencies. In the process, they’ve found that compliance responsibilities are often fragmented across multiple staff members, including controllers, CFOs, winemakers and office staff. In the process, Reynolds found a common issue: staff members don’t realize how these different reports are interconnected.
Reynolds conceived the Winery Compliance Training Academy Webinar Series as a way to help winery staff tasked with compliance responsibility to “connect the dots” between the different reports and also give them the opportunity she didn’t have—someone to ask.
“A huge benefit of my background is that I can talk to anybody in a winery’s organization and understand what they’re doing with their particular compliance assignment,” Reynolds says, “and then explain the best way to report it.”
The series is a direct extension of the Wine Compliance Alliance’s goal to bring clarity to the compliance process and Reynolds’s 10+ years of teaching compliance at Napa Valley College. The webinar series will offer practical, real-world guidance, and the live sessions include opportunities for questions.
The Winery Compliance Training Academy Webinar Series will be spaced out over 2026, beginning in January with an overview of the reports required by federal and California agencies. Four webinars will cover the federal TTB reports, which are applicable to any winery in the US. The remaining five webinars will cover the three California governmental agencies: California ABC, California Department of Tax and Fee and the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Recordings of the sessions will also be available for purchase by those who can’t join the live sessions.
Stop by Wine Compliance Alliance’s booth number 120 at the Expo to register for the new Webinar program.