There is an ongoing discussion among the dudes at my place of employment (wine retail shop) in re: wine as a tax deductible business expense.
Anybody have thoughts? I figure it’s market research. I certainly sell a ton more chenin than I would were I to go in blind. I mean geez, if they’re business gifts they go down as legit.
OK, being an employee then the expense will be a non-reimbursed business expense deductable on Schedule A as a miscellaneous deduction subject to 2% of your AGI. This means you take your AGI and subtract 2% of this from those types of miscellaneous expenses. As an example if you made 50K you would subtract 1K from miscellaneous expenses before getting a deduction. If you do not itemize deductions then it won’t help you at all.
This being said the deduction would still need to be an ordinary and necessary expense.
My philosophy is, take the deduction. Just be prepared to defend it in an audit. And be prepared to lose.
If one were blogging about wine, and purchased wines that were fodder for published tasting notes or articles, would those be potentially deductible expenses, assuming the blog had revenue-generating intentions?