How to Legally Sell Wine: Licence Rules by Country

Owning wine and selling wine are two different legal acts, and only the second one is licensed.

How to legally sell wine comes down to three questions, and they are the same three everywhere. Who is the buyer: a consumer, or a trade buyer? Are you the seller of record, or is a licensed intermediary? And where does the wine physically go? According to Section 1 of the Licensing Act 2003, "the sale by retail of alcohol" is a licensable activity in England and Wales, and nothing in it turns on volume, profit or how often you do it. In the United States, 27 U.S.C. 203 permits importers, producers and wholesalers, while each state licenses retail itself: New York's Alcoholic Beverage Control Law bars any person from selling "at wholesale or retail any alcoholic beverage within the state without obtaining the appropriate license". In the EU the binding constraint is excise, not licensing. Consign to a licensed house or broker and the licence problem becomes theirs.

This is a guide to how the rules are shaped, not legal advice. Where the money lands, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, sits in selling wine legally in the UK, selling wine legally in the US and selling wine legally in the EU.

Do you need a licence to sell wine you already own?

If the buyer is another private person, in England and Wales, yes. Under the Licensing Act 2003, the licence attaches to the act of selling, not to whether you profited, and not to whether you did it once.

GOV.UK states it without wriggle room: "Businesses, organisations and individuals who want to sell or supply alcohol in England and Wales must have a licence or other authorisation from a licensing authority - usually a local council." That sentence names individuals. The same GOV.UK page sets out three authorisations. On premises: "any business or other organisation that sells or supplies alcohol on a permanent basis needs to apply for a premises licence." On people: "anyone who plans to sell or supply alcohol or authorise the sale or supply of alcohol must apply for a personal licence." And a temporary event notice covers one-off events.

The Act lists places where selling alcohol is not licensable. Section 173 names them: aboard an aircraft, hovercraft or railway vehicle "engaged on a journey", aboard a vessel "engaged on an international journey", an approved wharf at a designated port or hoverport, an examination station at a designated airport, a royal palace, premises occupied for the purposes of the armed forces, and premises holding a national security certificate. A collector's cellar is not on that list, and neither is a car park handover.

Section 136 sets the consequence. A person commits an offence if "he carries on or attempts to carry on a licensable activity on or from any premises otherwise than under and in accordance with an authorisation", and is liable on summary conviction "to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to [ F1 a fine ], or to".

Are you selling retail or wholesale?

According to Section 192 of the Licensing Act 2003, the answer turns on who is buying, not on how many bottles move. A case to a neighbour is retail. A parcel to a merchant can fall outside the retail definition entirely, and that changes which regime you are in.

Section 192 of the Licensing Act 2003 defines "sale by retail" as a sale to any person other than one clearing three tests at once. It has to be within subsection (2), it has to be "made from premises owned by the person making the sale, or occupied by him under a lease to which the provisions of Part 2 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 (c. 56) (security of", and it has to be "made for consumption off the premises". Subsection (2) covers sales to "a trader for the purposes of his trade", to a club holding a club premises certificate, to a personal licence holder, to a premises licence holder, and to the user of a temporary event notice.

Read the premises limb again, because it is the one collectors miss. The carve-out needs all three tests, including a property interest in the place the sale is made from. A case sitting in a third-party bonded warehouse is not obviously your premises.

Then there is the tax side. According to HMRC's Excise Notice 2002, a sale is wholesale when "the seller is carrying on a trade or business and the sale is made in the course of that business" and "the sale is to a buyer carrying on a trade or business, for sale or supply in the course of that business". HMRC states that sales to private individuals sit outside the scheme, along with intra-group sales between members of the same corporate group.

The obligation that catches people runs the other way. GOV.UK advises trade buyers that if you buy alcoholic products to sell from a UK wholesaler, "you'll need to check that the wholesaler is approved by HMRC", and to repeat the check regularly, keeping records "as evidence of your due diligence activities". HMRC states the exposure in Excise Notice 2002: it "may seize stock supplied from an unapproved UK wholesaler, apply penalties of up to £10,000, or even prosecute". So when a merchant asks whether you are selling as a business, that is not small talk. It is their compliance file.

Why is there no national wine licence in the United States?

Because there is no single regulator. According to 27 U.S.C. 203, federal law permits the tiers above retail, and the states license retail. Nothing joins them up.

27 U.S.C. 203 makes it unlawful, without a basic permit, to "engage in the business of importing into the United States distilled spirits, wine, or malt beverages", to distil, produce, rectify, blend or bottle, or to "engage in the business of purchasing for resale at wholesale distilled spirits, wine, or malt beverages". Retail is absent from that list, and the section "shall not apply to any agency of a State or political subdivision thereof". That silence is the three-tier system: Washington licenses the pipe, the states license the tap.

State law then does the work. According to New York's ABC Law section 100(1), no person may sell at wholesale or retail without "the appropriate license therefor required by this chapter". According to California's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, a Type 20 covers off-sale beer and wine, and a Type 21 covers off-sale general, which authorises "the sale of beer, wine and distilled spirits for consumption off the premises where sold". The one California licence type that names auctions is the Type 31 Special Daily, "issued to a valid non-profit 501(c)(3) or other qualified organizations to sell alcoholic beverages via auction or online raffle for fundraising events". A collector with forty cases is not a 501(c)(3).

One federal rule closes the obvious workaround. 18 U.S.C. 1716(f) states: "All spirituous, vinous, malted, fermented, or other intoxicating liquors of any kind are nonmailable and shall not be deposited in or carried through the mails." The post office is not an option, whatever the buyer suggests.

What does the EU actually regulate?

Movement and tax, more than the licence. Licences are national and vary; excise is EU-wide and is where a private sale goes wrong.

The European Commission lists a minimum excise rate for wine, still and sparkling, of EUR 0 per hectolitre of product, against EUR 550 per hectolitre of pure alcohol for spirits, and notes that "EU countries are free to apply excise duty rates above these minima, according to their own national needs". Zero minimum reads as freedom. It is not, because the rate that matters is the destination country's, not the origin's.

The governing principle, in the Commission's guidance for travellers, is that "excise duties must be paid in the country where alcohol and tobacco are consumed", with an exemption for private individuals moving goods between EU countries that "applies as long as the products purchased are for your own use and not for resale". The Commission lists a guide level for wine of 90 litres, of which only 60 may be sparkling. Ninety litres is ten twelve-bottle cases. Move more than that, or move it with a buyer waiting, and you are arguing about intent with someone who does this for a living.

Commercial movements run on paperwork you cannot raise yourself. The Excise Movement and Control System is, in the Commission's words, "a computerised system for recording and monitoring the movement of excise goods (alcohol, tobacco and energy products) in the EU", and "more than 190,000 economic operators currently use the system". The Commission notes that duty-suspended movements travel under an electronic administrative document and duty-paid ones under a simplified version. The document "is issued by the original consignor". The consignor in that sentence is a registered business. That single fact is why in-bond parcels move under a warehouse account rather than a private one.

Can you sell homemade wine?

You can make it at home in both the US and the UK. You can sell it in neither, and in both places the permission and the prohibition are written as one sentence.

In the US, 27 CFR 24.75 says "any adult may, without payment of tax, produce wine for personal or family use and not for sale", capped at 200 gallons per calendar year for a household of two or more adults and 100 gallons for a single-adult household. The wine may be removed for "organized affairs, exhibitions or competitions, such as home winemaker's contests, tastings or judgings, but may not under any circumstances be sold or offered for sale".

In the UK the gate is HMRC approval and it comes first. GOV.UK states: "you must hold an APPA before you start to produce alcoholic products in the UK", and you will not need an APPA to produce alcoholic products for domestic use (this excludes spirits). The exemption is defined by use, so it ends the moment the intention is sale. Approval has to exist before the first fermentation, not before the first invoice.

What consigning fixes

Every licence question above belongs to the seller of record. Consign, and that party is an auction house, a broker or a merchant, and the licence, the premises and the bonded movement are theirs.

What you keep is title and tax. The house will ask you to warrant that the wine is yours and untainted, and the gain on the sale remains your affair. What you give up is fees, and they are large enough to change which route wins: the seller side is itemised in what will I net selling my wine, the buyer side in the buyer's premium guide, and the delivered arithmetic in the landed-cost calculator.

Does any of this change what your wine is worth?

It changes which rooms you can sell in, and the room sets the price. Legality is a liquidity question wearing a compliance costume.

The wider a wine's distribution, the more licensed buyers sit inside any one jurisdiction, so the route you pick costs you fees rather than access. That is the position a Champagne like Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame sells from. The narrower the float, as with Pétrus, the fewer rooms carry a real bid. If those rooms sit in a jurisdiction your wine cannot legally reach, the number on the screen is a price someone else can get.

The fine wine market index shows what has been hammered rather than what has been asked, and how we label a price explains why an ask, a bid and a hammer are three different numbers before any of them reaches you.

Know the number before you ask anyone for a quote

The worst position in this subject is not being unlicensed. It is being unlicensed and uninformed, ringing round merchants who know exactly what your case is worth while you do not.

We publish live market prices on every wine you own, so you walk into the consignment conversation with the same screen the buyer is looking at. Join the list and we will tell you when your wines move.