Finally…after years of begging, the Oregon legislature has aligned the tax class designations of wine to 16%, which is the current standard.

For years, the TTB and OLCC mirrored each other with the percentage threshold of 14% for tax class (but the feds also classify artificially carbonated and naturally sparkling as different classes).

As a practical matter, most of Oregon’s wineries tend to fall in the under 14% range anyway, so reporting was easy – just take your end of year wine premises report and drop it into the schedule 9.

But when the Trump Administration changed the tax class in 2017 from 14%, we were faced with the mundane task of preparing effectively three classes of wine: under 14%, 14 to 16%, and above 16%. Chaos ensued!

That meant that preparing your schedule 9 could not simply be done with your TTB report any longer, since the 16% threshold was much higher than the state’s. You also had to aver to Privilege that your wines were indeed under 14%.

But the OLCC was able to convince the legislature to make an easy fix to our reporting. Now our reports can once again align with the TTB.