See exactly what you'll get
A real COLAClear report (winery name redacted at customer request). Color-coded results, CFR citations on every flag, downloadable as a PDF.
“It was very easy and gave results quickly. A great tool, especially when you’re creating a brand new label or making major adjustments
and want to know if it has a chance to pass. Time saver for sure!”
— Kelly Sheridan, Peltier Winery & Vineyards (Lodi, CA)
Pre-screens wine, spirits, and beer labels against the federal and state rules that drive TTB rejections — in seconds, not days.
A real COLAClear report (winery name redacted at customer request). Color-coded results, CFR citations on every flag, downloadable as a PDF.
Upload your label artwork — JPG, PNG, PDF, or TIFF. Front and back labels uploaded separately.
Our compliance engine reads every word on your label and checks it against 30+ federal and state regulations.
Get a color-coded report — green (pass), yellow (review), red (fix) — with specific rule citations. Download as PDF.
There's nothing else like it. Today, you have four options for label compliance — and none of them do what COLAClear does.
Read through 27 CFR Part 4 (wine) and Part 5 (distilled spirits), cross-reference state rules, and hope you didn't miss anything. A missing comma in the Surgeon General's warning is enough to send your label back.2 If TTB returns it with "Needs Correction," you have 30 days to fix and resubmit, or the application is automatically rejected.1 A corrected label then has to be re-reviewed by TTB before it can be approved.
COLAClear isn't one. We review your label for compliance before you submit it to TTB; we don't file your COLA for you. A filing service fills out your COLA form and submits it to TTB — administrative work, not a systematic review of your label against the regulations. If something on the label itself is non-compliant, a filing service may not catch it.
Thorough, but turnaround depends on their client queue. Even streamlined law firm services require engagement fees costing thousands of dollars before per-label work begins. COLAClear handles the non-discretionary portion — the checks with clear pass/fail answers under the regulations — in seconds, with CFR citations, no engagement fee, and no retainer. An attorney is still the right choice when the question requires judgment.
Existing platforms handle licensing, permits, distribution, and tax reporting. None of them review what's actually on your label before you submit it to TTB.
COLAClear fills the gap. TTB built a "Needs Correction" workflow directly into COLAs Online — the system's own acknowledgment that label errors happen often enough to need a dedicated correction path. Automated regulatory analysis — 30+ federal and state compliance checks run against your label in seconds. It catches the errors that cause TTB corrections before you submit. No one else does this. This category didn't exist before COLAClear.
COLAClear runs 30+ federal and state checks for wine and spirits (21 automated pass/fail + up to 17 flagged for review) plus ~19 federal and state overlay checks for beer, plus documentation reminders for items TTB requires that can't be verified from the label image alone. Standard wine, spirits, and beer labels are in scope — table wine, varietal wines, bourbon, vodka, single malt, lager, ale, IPA, stout, and similar. Flavored wines, liqueurs, RTDs, sake, flavored/specialty malt beverages (FMBs, hard seltzers, flavored beers), and wines under 7% ABV are out of scope.
21 checks that run automatically — health warning text and exact wording, alcohol format, net contents, standards of fill, importer statements, geographic designations, and more. Includes California conjunctive labeling (the state requirement to pair county appellations with "California") and Oregon varietal rules.
Up to 17 checks that identify potential issues — type size, contrast, appellation validity, varietal names, permit verification, prohibited practices (disparaging statements, guarantees, unsubstantiated claims), and subjective claims like "Reserve" or "Natural."
Documentation reminders for items we can't verify from the label but TTB requires — grape sourcing percentages, actual barrel age, mashbill composition (the grain recipe for whiskeys), estate ownership. Not part of the automated checks; surfaced separately so you don't forget them.
COLAClear works best on standard-print labels with high-contrast text. Foil-embossed, heavily textured, or very decorative labels may produce unreliable automated results — for those, we recommend attorney review.
COLAClear is free during beta. Post-beta pricing will be per-label with no subscription, retainer, or engagement fee — pay only when you need a review.
Check your label before you submit — faster than a filing service, more systematic than a quick review, and cheaper than a correction cycle.
You're not a compliance specialist — you're a winemaker, a distiller, an importer. You handle COLA (Certificate of Label Approval) submissions alongside everything else. The typical producer files just 4 labels per year with the TTB3 — not enough to justify a compliance hire, but enough to lose weeks when one comes back for corrections.
83.0% of domestic wine producers filed 10 or fewer COLAs in 2025.3 For most, label compliance is an occasional task done without dedicated staff.
82.9% of domestic distillers filed 10 or fewer COLAs in 2025.3 Spirits labeling rules — class/type classifications, statements of composition (the TTB-approved description of a non-standard product), formula consistency — are among the most complex in the industry.4
Importers manage labels from multiple countries that must comply with U.S. federal and state rules. Volume varies widely — but even among importers, the majority file 10 or fewer labels per year.3 COLAClear cross-validates protected geographic designations — "Tequila," "Scotch," "Cognac," "Mezcal," and similar — against the label's stated country of origin, catching mismatches before TTB does. In response to customer requests, the engine now also validates French wine appellations — Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, Rhône, Alsace, Loire, and roughly 190 others — under the imported-wine appellation rules in 27 CFR 4.25(b), so imported French wine labels run through the same automated pre-screen as domestic submissions.
Zillah Bahar built COLAClear using Claude Code and her industry savoir faire. She has 20+ years in the wine and spirits industry — distribution at Southern Glazer's and RNDC, plus ecommerce content and sales analytics. She holds the WSET Level 3 Award in Wines, is a Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW), a Spanish Wine Scholar, and a California Appellation Specialist. She earned her MBA from Mills College and her BA in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Connect on LinkedIn, visit her Wine & Spirits Media Hub, or email zillah.bahar@colaclear.com.
COLAClear grew out of watching small producers and importers lose weeks to preventable label corrections. The regulations are dense, and most producers handle COLA submissions alongside their actual jobs — not as a specialty. COLAClear encodes the non-discretionary portion of federal and state labeling rules into a rules engine, so the routine errors get caught before submission rather than after TTB returns the label with a "Needs Correction" status.