Answers to the questions we hear most often from wine, spirits, and beer producers.
COLAClear is a pre-screening tool that checks wine, spirits, and beer labels for compliance with federal TTB regulations (27 CFR Parts 4, 5, 7, and 16) and state-specific labeling rules — California and Oregon for wine and spirits; Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, California, and Oregon for beer. You upload your label artwork, and the tool runs 34 federal + state checks for wine and spirits (or 21 federal + state overlays for beer) in seconds — before you submit to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) for a Certificate of Label Approval (COLA).
Use COLAClear at any of these trigger moments:
No. COLAClear is not a filing service. We review your label for compliance before you submit it to TTB yourself. You file your COLA application through TTB's COLAs Online system as you normally would — COLAClear's job is to catch errors beforehand so your application doesn't come back with a "Needs Correction" status.
COLAClear covers standard wine, spirits, and beer labels — table wine, varietal wines, bourbon, vodka, single malt, lager, ale, IPA, stout, and similar products that fit established TTB class/type categories.
Out of scope: flavored wines, liqueurs, ready-to-drink cocktails, sake, flavored or specialty malt beverages (FMBs, hard seltzers, flavored beers), and wines under 7% alcohol by volume. These products either require TTB formula approval or fall under different regulatory frameworks. If you upload a label for a product in one of these categories, the system will detect it and decline the submission without charging you.
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. The exact per-review price will be announced when we exit beta.
JPG, PNG, TIFF, and WEBP. PDF is not accepted — label PDFs are typically print-ready files with text stored as vector outlines or low-DPI embedded images, which OCR handles poorly. If your label artwork is only available as a PDF, export it as a high-resolution PNG or JPEG (300 DPI or higher) before uploading. Most design software supports a one-click export.
34 compliance checks across two tiers: 24 automated pass/fail (health warning text and exact wording, alcohol format, net contents, standards of fill, importer statements, geographic designations, and more) and 10 flagged for user review (type size, contrast, appellation validity, subjective claims like "Reserve"). Plus 9 documentation reminders for items TTB requires that can't be verified from the label alone, like grape sourcing percentages and actual barrel age.
State coverage includes California conjunctive labeling requirements and Oregon's stricter varietal percentage rules. See the What We Check section on the homepage for details, or watch the 3-minute demo below.
COLAClear handles the non-discretionary portion of label compliance — the checks with clear pass/fail answers under the regulations — in seconds, with CFR citations, and without an engagement fee or retainer.
A beverage compliance attorney handles the judgment calls: complex product positioning, potentially misleading brand names, disputes with TTB over ambiguous rules, and regulatory work that requires interpretation. An attorney is still the right choice when the question requires judgment. We catch the routine errors; they handle the discretionary work.
Most tools that come up in a search for "wine label compliance" fall into adjacent categories rather than direct alternatives. EU e-label generators produce QR codes for European ingredient and nutrition disclosure but don't address U.S. TTB requirements. Label design tools generate artwork but don't validate it against regulations. TTB's own "Anatomy of a Label" tool is an educational reference, not a compliance checker. Compliance software like Sovos ShipCompliant and Avalara handle tax, shipping, and permit workflows but don't review label content.
As of May 2026, COLAClear is the only tool we know of that automatically reads label artwork and validates it against the live text of 27 CFR Parts 4, 5, and 16, with a CFR citation behind every flag.
No. These are formula-dependent products that require TTB formula approval before a COLA can even be considered. The compliance framework for flavored or specialty products involves judgment calls a rules-based tool can't make reliably. If you upload a label for one of these products, our system detects the formula-dependent terms (flavored, cordial, liqueur, RTD, sake, and similar) and declines the submission without charging you — with a recommendation to consult a qualified beverage compliance attorney.
COLAClear is a pre-screening tool. It is not a guarantee of TTB approval and does not constitute legal advice. We catch common, well-defined labeling errors before you submit — the kind of errors that cause the majority of TTB "Needs Correction" returns. But TTB reviewers also make subjective judgments (is a brand name misleading? is imagery appropriate?) that no automated tool can predict with certainty.
Our recommendation: use COLAClear to catch the straightforward errors, and for unusual or complex labels, pair it with attorney review.
COLAClear uses Google Cloud Vision for optical character recognition. On clean, high-resolution label artwork, the OCR confidence is typically 95% or higher. After each check, we display the OCR confidence percentage for each label you uploaded. If any label reads below 80%, some compliance checks may be less reliable — we recommend re-uploading a higher-resolution image for that label.
COLAClear uses optical character recognition (OCR) to read label text, then checks that text against TTB regulations. OCR works reliably on standard printed labels with high-contrast text — dark ink on light background, or vice versa. It is less reliable on foil embossing, metallic ink on colored backgrounds, heavily textured paper, reverse-foil text (text cut out of foil), very decorative script fonts, or images that are blurry, angled, or low resolution.
If our OCR cannot read your label with enough confidence to produce a reliable result, we automatically refund your purchase and let you know. For labels whose design makes them fundamentally difficult for OCR, attorney review is the appropriate path.
When you upload a label, the image is transmitted to Google Cloud Vision for text extraction. Images, OCR results, and compliance reports are stored in our database (Supabase, hosted in the United States) and scoped so that each user can only access their own data. We do not sell user data, and we do not share your label artwork with third parties beyond the processing services required to run the checks.
A full Privacy Policy is currently under development with legal counsel and will be published before we exit beta. If you have questions about data handling in the meantime, email zillah.bahar@colaclear.com or use the feedback form in the dashboard.
COLAClear runs on a standard, current security stack:
SOC 2 certification is not currently in scope — COLAClear is an early-stage product — but may be pursued when enterprise use cases require it.
Sign up for a free label check and see COLAClear in action. No credit card required during beta.