There’s a question that doesn’t get asked enough in Virginia: not is the wine good? but is the business behind it healthy? Those are two different questions, and the gap between them is where good wineries quietly get into trouble.

That gap is exactly where we’re pointing our newest initiative. This week we’re kicking off the Coalition’s Cost of Production project, and we couldn’t think of a better way to open the conversation than the webinar we just hosted with Zane Stevens, founder of Protea Financial. Zane’s team keeps the books for more than 160 wineries, and he’s spent over a decade in the place most of us would rather not look: the day-to-day financial detail of running a winery.

His talk walked through five costly financial blind spots — the kind that don’t announce themselves, because the tasting room is busy and the club is growing and everything feels fine. A few of them will probably sound a little too familiar:

  • Not knowing what a bottle actually costs to make and sell
  • Treating your single biggest asset, your inventory, as a guess
  • Letting seasonal swings disguise whether you really made money
  • Flying blind on margins, with no benchmark for what “good” even looks like
  • Optimizing the tax bill before there’s a profit to protect

It’s not abstract. Zane shared the winery that was out $75,000 in dry goods the day he started: boxes, labels, and broken glass that had never been written off. And the 30-year-old brand that made its cheapest wine more delicious, didn’t account for distributor allowances, and ended up losing a dollar on every case it sold…until it didn’t exist anymore.

The throughline of the whole session is simple: there’s accounting built to file your taxes, and there’s accounting built to help you make decisions. Most of us are running the business on the first kind. Zane makes the case for the second.

Use the link below to watch the recording and read the notes. The notes distill the entire session, including the real examples, the Q&A on storage and library wine, and what clean books mean if you ever plan to sell, pass the winery on, or borrow against it.

And keep an eye on your inbox: the first materials from our Cost of Production study, including healthy margin benchmarks by channel and SKU-level costing guidance, are landing in the coming days. If you’re not on the mailing list yet, now’s the time.

Great wine is the hard part, and Virginia has that handled. Let’s go get the margins, too.

Click Here to View Recording