How to Find Wineries and Distilleries to Sell To

If you sell bottles, labels, packaging, tanks, lab services, tasting room software, distribution or marketing to wineries and distilleries, the federal government has already built most of your list. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, TTB, publishes lists of permit holders, and they're free to download.

There's one big gap, and it's worth knowing before you start: breweries aren't on them. Packaging and equipment suppliers ask how to build this list in r/sales and r/smallbusiness.

What TTB publishes

TTB's List of Permittees page offers downloadable files by type of business:

TTB says it updates these lists weekly, and also offers the full set as a JSON file. The newly issued permits list is the most interesting one for sales, since it shows businesses at the stage where they're buying equipment and supplies for the first time.

TTB's permittee lists. Newly issued permits show businesses buying for the first time.

Why breweries aren't included

TTB doesn't publish lists of brewers, industrial alcohol users or tobacco permit holders, because brewer records are protected as taxpayer information under the Internal Revenue Code. For breweries, use state alcohol licensing records, which many states publish, along with brewery websites and map listings.

Who to contact

For packaging and production supplies, the winemaker or head distiller is the person to win. For tasting room software, clubs and direct-to-consumer sales, look for a tasting room or DTC manager. For distribution and marketing, the owner or a sales director.

Timing in wine and spirits

Wineries have a strong annual rhythm. Harvest and crush, roughly late summer into autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, are the busiest weeks of the year, and nobody reads sales email during them. Packaging and bottling decisions are planned months ahead of bottling runs. Distilleries are less seasonal but often busiest before the holiday sales period.

A new permit holder is the exception to all of this. They're buying now.

What to say

Producers care about their product, their margins and their time:

Hi [Name], I saw [winery or distillery] received its federal permit recently. Congratulations. We supply [what you sell] to [type of producer], including [a reference you can name, with permission]. [One decision new producers usually face early, from your own customers.] Would it help if I sent [samples, a price sheet or a short guide]?

Doing it with ManyPI

Disclosure: ManyPI is our product.

Download the TTB list for your state and import it into ManyPI. The agent finds each producer's website and the owner's or production lead's email, and checks every address against the receiving mail server before a campaign can use it. Or describe the list in a sentence, for example "craft distilleries in Kentucky and Tennessee with a tasting room, with the owner's email", and the agent researches it on the live web. Sequences go out from your own inbox and stop when someone replies. The lead generation page covers the setup.

A distillery search typed into the ManyPI agent.

A note on the data: TTB says the county field is entered by the permittee and may not match where the premises actually are. Use the address, not the county, when you split the list into territories.