Copyright Santa Rosa Press Democrat
This year, we selected two top accounting leaders in the North Bay to answer our questions about regulations, challenges of their business and what they wish people knew about the industry. What do you or your clients see as the biggest challenge as a result of Assembly Bill 720, which allows wineries to host limited numbers of estate tasting events? Timothy Allen: In my opinion, the sales decline in both distribution and DTC is the biggest challenge to our wine clients. Whether the reduction in consumer purchasing is a permanent shift or temporary doesn’t matter to this year’s cash flow, it’s just a shift. Our clients are becoming more creative every day with their sales approach to the DTC consumer. They’re also taking a hard look regarding which markets to continue for distribution. Jon Dal Poggetto: The biggest challenges in implementing estate tasting events are probably the logistics involved in transportation to venues that may be in remote areas, and the necessary improvements required to provide a safe and welcoming environment for consumers at those locations. Jon Dal Poggetto Jon Dal Poggetto is celebrating his 50th year in public accounting, and is Managing Partner of Santa Rosa based CPA firm Dal Poggetto & Company LLP, a position he has held since the firm’s start in 1992. He is a graduate of University of California, Berkeley. He was a partner with the CPAvfirms of Eisenberg & Company LLP, Touche Ross & Co. and Deloitte & Touche before founding his own firm. Poggetto’s personal area of focus is coordinating the firm’s delivery of accounting, tax and consulting services to privately held companies and their owners. The firm serves over 400 clients with a particular emphasis serving clients in the wine industry. What other changes, in tax law or regulatory compliance, for example, have helped or hurt the most in the past year? Timothy Allen: Tariffs have emerged as a new a wildcard for our import and export clients. Although it’s not a new law, we see the vineyard overtime rules change from 60 hours / six days to 40 hours / five days continues to have a negative impact on farming costs. Minimum wage laws also negatively impact winery hiring, specifically in vineyard and DTC sales jobs. No one wants a kiosk pouring your wine tasting. Timothy Allen Timothy Allen CPA & MST, managing partner of Allen Wine Group, has more than 30 years of winery finance experience, including five years with a Big 4 CPA firm, 14 years working in operations and finance at wineries and 15 years leading AWG Wine Advisors, formerly Allen Wine Group. Allen began his career at Deloitte in San Francisco in both audit and tax serving wine clients. He became controller, CFO and president at wineries including Kendall-Jackson, Sonoma-Cutrer, Robert Mondavi, Rosenblum Cellars, and Kuleto Estate. Allen founded AWG Wine Advisors, a wine industry CPA firm, in 2010. Jon Dal Poggetto: The passage of the OBBB (2025 Act) in July 2025 provided much needed extensions of several business tax provisions originally contained in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. These include a return to 100% bonus depreciation on equipment purchases, expensing of research and development costs and more favorable limitations of business interest expense, among other provisions. Has the new rule about “subscription services,” making it easier to cancel a (wine) subscription, had the anticipated effect on sales and wine club memberships? Jon Dal Poggetto: While it is somewhat difficult to measure the effect on wine club signups and sales as a result of the FTC rules that ease the process of cancelling memberships (mostly due to all of the other factors that are currently affecting wine industry sales), it is believed that the rule will have a net positive impact by reducing concerns that might prevent some consumers from signing up for memberships. What’s an issue that you would like readers to understand when it comes to your clients and your industry? (Tax cuts, Jobs Act, DTC rules, tariff war, cash flow, etc.) Timothy Allen: Like most small and midsize wineries, our clients are just trying to survive. No one starts a winery to make $100M, they do it because they love the wine, the people and the agriculture. When wine sales suffer, the whole industry suffers. I would like the readers to understand that cash flow problems are trickle-down, your customer isn’t paying you on time because their customer isn’t paying them on time. My hope is that as an industry we can all give each other some understanding re: payment timing until we get through this.
