The holidays are coming and wines need to ship NOW to get here. TTB is not approving new or modified labels. Anyone got a horror story to tell yet?
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PLEASE keep this apolitical and just discuss logistics.
Frankly, I’m pretty sure no one is waiting on labels for this year, and by now most importers have them approved for the end of year sales season (I know we do). I haven’t seen any slowdowns in transport. The most annoying thing is we can’t get COLA Waivers to have samples of new wines sent.
Another annoying thing, the COLA database is shutdown, which is just idiotic. I mean, how much does it cost to run a website?
Absolutely - we had a large deal brewing that was finally approved, but requires a modified label… Right now the deal is DOA unless something changes soon. And we are usually printing our labels for next year’s Rosé this time of year, that will have to be put on hold if this continues.
I imagine that the guys who run the mobile bottling lines will be in big trouble if this doesn’t get resolved soon.
We were planning to import an Extra Brut Champagne from Le Mesnil but didn’t get the COLA submitted in time. The regular Brut and Vintage were already approved. Quite a few craft beer producers are in a bind.
Rick Allen related delays in approval holding up some aspect of his operation as did Berry Crawford; I think it was labels in both cases. May have been in politics…
What is COLA in this context? TIA
COLA is label approval.
So I was not able to start the ttb approval for a winery space until I signed a lease. The day I signed the lease the govt shut down. I’m totally dead in the water until the budget is approved. I’m a bit frustrated.
Cameron Hughes tweeted the shutdown is costing him $1-2 million…
“Govt shutdown and subsequent TTB backlog of label registrations cause me to lose $1-2MM in overall revenue this year. Ouch.”
We’re a Brewery. We have a holiday beer every year called Sandy Paws that we try to release right around Thanksgiving. The label changes every year (this is a fund-raiser for the local Ed Foundation where we raffle off the right to have your dog on the label). The label is ready.for approval now and we need a couple of weeks for printing. We need to get label approval in the next 2 weeks to make our deadline. If not, we’ll bottle as shiners and hopefully get it to market while a Christmas beer is still relevant.
TTB’s COLA site is back up as of 9am Thursday morning. Yay!
Started my application this morning as soon as I woke up.
My new craft breweries from Spain have all been held up - they were all a little late in filing for COLAs - not understanding why they couldn’t be approved in one day - One of the bigger breweries was waiting for a 6 figure line of credit to go through - but the bank wouldn’t give it too them until they could prove that the labels were registered in the US -
Needless to say, It’s going to be crazy the rest of the week -
I know Cristom is having some label approval problems but I don’t know if this is the culprit
I went into COLA this morning to put in my Sandy Paws label, and the system was super slow. I imagine they are just getting swamped with applications.
Wow, back on line. The lying and cheating that just went on to move wine was amazing. My favorite line was from an importer out West who lent me an approval legally, “I feel your pain” - Just typing that makes me laugh. Try saying that out loud! Have a nice weekend.
Robert