If you’re a wine lover ready to turn passion into profit, learning how to start a wine business is the first step in turning your dream into a reality.
Read on to learn about the types of wine businesses, along with steps for starting a retail wine business, including how to secure business capital. Jeff Segal, founding partner of Domestique Wine, a natural wine shop in Washington, DC, shares expert insights to help you get started.
Types of wine businesses
Here are six types of wine businesses to consider:
Vineyard
A vineyard is a parcel of land where you grow grapes. Starting a vineyard from scratch requires capital and patience. Initial harvests typically don’t take place for the first four years, with first vintages ready a year later. Although getting started is a slow process, the grapes you plant can last for generations.
You can move up your first harvest by purchasing an existing vineyard. Just know it can be costly: In high-demand areas like the northern and central coasts of California, an acre can cost more than $150,000.
Some colleges and universities have agriculture extension programs that share information on maintaining vineyards in their areas. For example, Oregon State University’s online resources share information about starting a vineyard in the Northwest.
After harvest, you have a few options for what to do with your grapes. Your decision impacts how you’ll be licensed on the federal level.
You can turn your grapes into wine yourself, in which case you’ll have both a vineyard and a winery. You’ll then need to meet federal requirements for bonded wineries. You can also share a winemaking facility with another company, which would classify you as an alternating proprietor.
Another option is to function as a wholesaler: you’ll sell grapes to winemakers who’ll produce bottles under their own labels. If you want your own label but don’t want to make wine, you can pay a custom crush facility to produce wine from your grapes and give you the finished product. In these two cases, you’ll be federally classified as a custom crush client.
Winery
Some vineyards are also wineries, meaning they produce wine on their property. However, you don’t need to grow your own grapes to run a winery. You can have a standalone winery that makes wine with grapes from other people’s vineyards.
Regardless of where the grapes come from, you need a bonded winery license from the federal government to produce wine on your property. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau shares information on licensing requirements on its website. Check your state government’s website to learn about necessary state licenses.
You can learn more about winemaking by working at a winery or taking courses. Universities like Cornell, Rutgers, and the University of California, Davis, offer online programs that teach you the basics.
In 2025, wineries earned their greatest share of sales from on-site tasting rooms, according to Statista. The second largest share of sales came from wine clubs, in which customers sign up to receive regular shipments of wines. You also have the option to sell bottles to retail shops and restaurants by connecting with a wine distributor partner.
Private label wine
Private labeling is selling a product manufactured by another company under your company’s brand name. If you want to have a wine label but don’t want to own a vineyard or operate a winery, you can sell private label wine.
Wineries create different private label wines exclusively for individual brands. Think Costco’s Kirkland brand wines or the Charles Shaw (“Two Buck Chuck”) you can find at Trader Joe’s.
There’s also the option of white label. Unlike private label wines, which wineries sell to only one brand, winemakers offer white label wines to multiple companies to label as their own.
Wine bar
In the United States, the wine bar market was valued at $3.4 billion in 2025, according to IBISWorld. A wine bar curates a selection of wines for consumption onsite and might serve food, too. Depending on your state, you might even be required to.
Some wine bars, like New York City’s Parcelle and San Francisco’s Ruby Wine, double as bottle shops. These bar-and-shop businesses also offer monthly wine subscriptions.
Wine bar permit and licensing requirements differ from state to state. In New York, for example, the type of license you need hinges on the style of food you’ll serve. A restaurant license requires you to sell full entrees, while a tavern license requires you to sell smaller menu items like soups and sandwiches. You’ll also need to adhere to food safety codes.
Wine store
Wine stores can be brick-and-mortar, online-only, or both, and may specialize in a specific niche, like natural wines or specific regions. Physical wine shops may host tastings or events with winemakers.
The licenses you need will depend on your state. In New York, you’ll need a wine store license from the New York State Liquor Authority. If you want to host tastings with winemakers at your New York shop, those wholesalers will need to procure marketing permits.
Subscription service
Some retail wine stores run primarily on a subscription model, like champagne-focused The Sip. Others, like Washington, DC’s Domestique Wine, offer subscriptions as an add-on to regular bottle offerings.
Subscribers sign up to receive a curated box of bottles on a regular schedule, either shipped to their home or made available for pick-up at a physical shop. Some subscription boxes include information about the featured wines, tasting notes, and winemaker profiles. These subscription services are sometimes called wine clubs.
Wine clubs give shops a steady income stream while fostering a sense of community among customers.
“The wine club is really core to our identity and people love it, and so it drives a lot of attention to the business,” says Jeff of Domestique. “As a result, we don’t really try to grow it or maximize profits from it. We focus a lot on making the experience as amazing as possible.”
Domestique’s wine club includes a monthly shipment or local pickup of wine alongside a newsletter about the bottles and their producers. It also includes a postcard on the bottles. The standard shipment is three bottles, but customers can add up to nine for a total of 12.
How to start a wine shop
- Define your vision
- Conduct market research
- Develop your brand
- Create a revenue model
- Write your business plan
- Build a website
- Secure funding
- Find a location
- Obtain licenses
- Build your inventory
- Market your wines
Starting a wine shop lets you share the wines you love most with customers. Follow these 11 steps to get started.
1. Define your vision
Clarify the mission of your shop and the foundational elements of your brand. Ask yourself: What is my business’s core purpose, or reason for being?
From there, start to think through aspects of your brand identity and the scope of your business.
“When I’m starting a business or even a project, I always have to come up with the name first,” says Jeff. “For me, the name is so core to the identity. I had this idea for a type of wine retailer in my head, but it was pretty nebulous, and then the name came to me one day and it all started to take form.”
Domestique’s name relates directly to its mission. In cycling, a “domestique” is a person who supports the team leader. “They’re still professionals operating at the highest level of what they do, but their job on the team is really to support somebody else,” Jeff says. “We saw that as our primary job: to be the domestique to our winemakers.” Domestique’s other role is supporting customers in their wine exploration journey.
Jeff says another way to define your vision is to identify the source of your inspiration.
“What is the seed of your idea?” Jeff says. “Is it from visiting another country, like going to France? Is it from visiting a wine shop in another city? Is it from a wine shop in your city that you love but doesn’t exist in your neighborhood?”
Your inspiration might not even be related to the world of wine. “Is it a website experience in another industry that you like and want to bring to wine?” Jeff says.
2. Conduct market research
Market research involves analyzing demographic data on your target market, conducting a competitive analysis, and looking into larger industry trends. It can also involve surveying potential customers about your nascent shop.
“Defining the vision and market research go hand in hand,” says Jeff. “You can do them in lockstep with each other."
“The first thing I did was market size the opportunity, then scope out the competitive landscape,” says Jeff. “From there, I had loads of conversations about everything from the name, Domestique, to the brand I was thinking of, to the website UX, to the look and feel of the shop, to our inventory. Those qualitative discussions were the core of my process.”
Jeff used a handful of tools to conduct market research, including Google Trends, Statista, Qualtrics, and SurveyMonkey.
Jeff started his wine shop in 2018.
“I launched Domestique before the rise of large language models (LLMs), and so if I were starting it now, Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity would be my starting points for market sizing, competitive landscaping, and general research,” says Jeff. “But I think you still need to have real discussions with real people.”
Shopify has a free market research template to guide your process.
3. Develop your brand
With a clarified vision and market research in hand, define your brand positioning. “Post-market research and competitive landscape research, it’s finding where your brand fits into the industry,” says Jeff. Clarify why shoppers should turn to you over competitors.
From here, develop the individual elements of your brand identity. Your brand identity includes foundational elements like brand values and brand mission. It also includes your brand personality and brand voice, as well as visual elements such as logo, color palette, and typography.
4. Create a revenue model
To understand the financial viability of your shop, create a revenue model. “It’s easy to get excited about a business idea and then look at the underlying math of it and realize it doesn’t work,” says Jeff. “It’s really important to get finances down as soon as possible and see if they make sense or not.”
To clarify Domestique’s finances, Jeff went through every assumption he’d made about his business, starting with foot traffic.
“How many people a day are going to come into your shop?” Jeff says. “How many people walk by that corner every day? What percentage of that will enter your shop? How many of those people will convert to buying a bottle? How many bottles will they buy? What will the average price of that bottle be?”
Extend this exercise into the online side of your business, too. Jeff looked at how many site visitors he’d receive, how he’d get shoppers to his site, how many browsers would convert, and what customers’ average sales total would be.
Then determine costs, including staffing and technology. “Everybody undershoots the cost, so I like to add a buffer and add 10% to 15%,” says Jeff.
5. Write your business plan
Now that you’ve created a revenue model, incorporate it into a business plan. A business plan is critical for raising capital, and lenders will want to see your financial projections.
When you create a business plan, you’ll also calculate how much money you need to start up. “With tools like Shopify, you can stay pretty lean and launch a wine shop for a few hundred thousand dollars,” says Jeff.
Business plans can do more than help you raise capital, though.
“It’s an important exercise in putting your thoughts down and extending what may be a small idea into something that is broad enough to be an actual business,” says Jeff.
A traditional business plan includes an executive summary, a company description, market research, a description of what you’ll sell, operational logistics, in addition to financial projections.
You can also create what’s known as a lean business plan. This is an abbreviated version of the full one, and often used for specific audiences. You might revise one to share with new hires or tweak it to focus on what investors want to know. Shopify’s business plan templates can help you get started.
6. Build a website
Even if you’re still far away from making your first sale, building a website can be an important step in clarifying your concept. “Similar to the business plan, I think it’s important for putting your brand down and the experience you want down. Storyboarding a website forces you to flesh it out,” says Jeff.
Domestique’s website actually came before its brick-and-mortar location. “We had a really strong idea of the brand we wanted to build—so we turned that into a website, and then started hunting for real estate from there,” says Jeff.
If ecommerce will be a component of your business, choose a website builder that supports online sales and has built-in features for inventory management, shipping, and fulfillment.
If you plan to open a physical storefront as well, make sure your ecommerce platform integrates with your chosen point-of-sale (POS) system. Shopify’s POS syncs inventory between your ecommerce and physical stores and has multiple POS hardware options, including handheld card readers and large countertop setups. It also has age verification features to help you ensure legal wine sales.
7. Secure funding
Your business plan will give you an idea of the exact amount of funding you need, and potential investors will likely ask to see it.
You can secure that funding through a few different channels:
- Traditional small business loans from banks or credit unions
- Grants from local or federal programs
- Crowdfunding
8. Find a location
Domestique has a thriving ecommerce presence and has become a nationally known shop, earning media features in publications including The Washington Post and Food & Wine. Still, in-person sales are an important aspect of the business, and they’re only slightly lower than online ones.
“Your location is extremely important,” says Jeff. But knowing where to open your doors isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. According to Jeff, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the market for retail locations.
“There can be little neighborhood shops on odd corners that can be supported now because of work-from-home patterns,” Jeff says. “Similarly, there may be discounted retail locations in more vibrant commercial corridors that are really strong deals right now, because they had been discounted, but people are returning to the office. So this is all very in flux right now.”
9. Obtain licenses
Establishments that sell or serve alcohol must attain liquor licenses. You might need other types of business licenses and permits, too. The exact types depend on your city and state.
In California, for example, wine stores must have a Type 20 license, which allows for off-site consumption, and a general Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) license, in addition to a business license, seller’s permit, signage permit, and more.
Check your state’s official .gov website to learn what you need. Some states, like New York, offer online questionnaires that give you a list of the licenses and permits you need to get.
“Expect that to take time,” says Jeff. “It always takes longer than you think, so budget for the fact that you will be without a license for some period of time.”
10. Build your inventory
There are a few ways to find wine suppliers and build your inventory. You can purchase bottles directly from winemakers, from distributors, or from importers.
To find your first suppliers, Jeff recommends going to every tasting you can and introducing yourself.
“Distributors really want to sell retailers wine,” says Jeff. “They will be very eager to meet a new shop owner.”
“The other way to do it is to visit your favorite shops in the area or in other areas, see the inventory they have, and then go do some research online to figure out which distributors bring in the wines you love,” says Jeff. “Or if you know the importers you love, which distributors work with those importers, and then work backward from there.”
Once you’ve sourced inventory, Jeff says to count on a standard markup of around 35%. “There’s not a ton of room for flexibility on profit margins and markups in wine retail,” says Jeff.
“That said, with increased buying power comes the potential for eking out some more margin. Most distributors will give retailers deals on wines that are bought in larger drops at one time.”
Buying five cases at once, for example, can give you an additional 5% to 10% markup. “That margin really adds up over time, so as you gain the ability to buy in larger quantities, you can turn that 35% into 40 or 45%,” says Jeff. You can use Shopify’s profit margin calculator to run projections.
11. Market your wines
“To me, the first strategy in marketing is understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP) and really knowing who your customer is. Once you truly know your customer, it becomes a lot easier,” says Jeff.
You’ll have already considered your ideal customers during the market research process. Once you’ve nailed this down, experiment with different types of marketing like paid ads, content marketing, experiential marketing, and social media marketing.
Tailor these efforts to your target audience.
“You can’t market to everybody,” says Jeff. “You have to be more tactical and more precise than that, in terms of just getting a return on the dollars you’re spending on marketing, even if it’s not paid.”
“The only way to do that is to really understand the audience you’re going for and market specifically to them.”
Use a marketing plan template to develop an intentional approach to getting the word out about your wine shop. A marketing plan also serves as a reference document for staying on track and evaluating what does and doesn’t work for your business.
4 tips for opening a wine shop
Decide what to be known for
“My advice is to have an idea of what you want to be known for early on and to spend an outsized portion of your money there,” says Jeff.
For Domestique, that was investing in the in-store shopping experience. “We knew that we wanted to have really unique, eye-catching shelving that felt more like shopping for high-end clothing than most wine stores,” Jeff says.
Domestique partnered with a master carpenter to build custom shelves. “We’ve become known for it,” says Jeff. “It was all really expensive and out of budget, but it was definitely worth it. It became really core to our identity.”
On the ecommerce side, Domestique invested heavily in branding and design. “Then we had to trim corners elsewhere, in places where we could do the work ourselves or ask for favors from friends to rein the cost back in," says Jeff.
One place Jeff never cut costs in was inventory: “Inventory is a place which is really important as a wine shop. It’s how customers define your shop, early on, and so it’s not a place I’d cut corners or try to save money,” says Jeff.
Start a newsletter
Domestique is well known for its email newsletter, which shares stories about winemaking and the people who make it, along with other musings more tangentially related to wine. “It’s primarily a place for us to write stories about things that interest us, showcase people from our corner of the world, and bring a moment of joy into people’s lives,” says Jeff.
Jeff says that Domestique puts more time into their marketing content than almost anything else. “Especially our newsletter, which is the cornerstone of our marketing and is how most people know us best,” says Jeff.
Domestique’s focus on newsletters aligns with its larger marketing strategy, which centers on building community. “We don’t really market our products to people, per se. We start discussions, bring people together, and market an experience. For us, that always begins with content,” says Jeff.
At first, Domestique sent their newsletters en masse every week. The company has since segmented their audience and learned about what different groups want to read about and when. Today, Domestique sends a newsletter to each audience segment around every two weeks.
To plan content, Domestique builds out an annual editorial content calendar then reviews it quarterly. The brand sends newsletters for holidays and events like Mother’s Day and harvest season. They also weigh in on larger cultural moments and discussions.
Create physical marketing materials
In addition to digital marketing methods like Google and Meta ads and organic Instagram posts, Domestique uses old-fashioned analog marketing. This includes materials like postcards, posters, flyers, and zines that go deep on individual topics like glassware and cycling. The brand keeps these on hand at their brick-and-mortar store.
Domestique has also sent postcards with targeted direct mail campaigns. Sending direct mail helps businesses get more eyes on their brand: 79% of consumers engage with the mail they receive, according to the 2026 Direct Mail Marketing Benchmark Report from direct marketing company Franklin Madison Direct. (In comparison, email marketing has only a 20% to 30% open rate, according to Litmus’s State of Email 2025 Report.)
Host events
Hosting in-person events helps Domestique cultivate community and generate word-of-mouth marketing, since the shop encourages customers to bring friends and family.
The shop hosts a few types of events. One is wine tastings.
“People really like to see a winemaker pour their wine and hear about their experiences,” says Jeff. “It’s always nice to hear from somebody working in the shop, but especially for people who tend to buy online, when they get to come in and get to be face-to-face with a winemaker and hear about the vineyard and the production, they’re very attracted to that.”
If your business includes topics people appreciate learning more about, events and customer education can be especially effective. One way to get more use from events is to record video content of your speaker then embed it in a blog on your website or upload it to social media.
You might enjoy creating a YouTube channel featuring educational content, such as explainer videos about different varietals or how to aerate wine.
Domestique does other types of events, too, like author readings. At one recent event, members of the National Symphony Orchestra played chamber music and Domestique served visitors wine pairings with the music.
How to start a wine business FAQ
How much does it cost to start a wine business?
The cost of opening a wine business depends on what type of wine business you’re starting. To open a wine shop, expect to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars.
How profitable is a wine business?
The profitability of a wine business like a bottle shop depends on factors including location, marketing costs, and staffing costs. A markup of around 35% is standard for retail wine.
Is it hard to start a wine business?
Yes, it can be difficult to start a wine business, but it can be profitable. According to Jeff Segal, founding partner at the wine shop Domestique, marketing is the hardest part of running a wine store.
How do I start my own wine business?
To start your own wine business, follow these steps:
- Define your vision
- Conduct market research
- Create a revenue model
- Write your business plan
- Build a website
- Secure funding
- Develop your brand
- Find a location
- Obtain licenses
- Find suppliers
- Market your wines
