Question: How can a subscriber be certain that your data accurately reflects the market? Your wine data especially has some significant variances from other published reports
Answer: We have gone back over a decade evaluating our methodologies on a month by month basis.
- As a cross check we have tested our volume calculations versus actual taxes collected for the period 2003 to 2014. We are very confident that the industry is compliant regarding excise tax compliance as well as that most industry members do not choose to overpay their taxes. Click here for a view of the tax reconciliation. There are some tax offsets that impact excise tax collection that I am fortunate to have experience with. These include:
- Small producer tax credit for beer,
- Small Producer tax credit for wine.
- Duty Drawback on still wines at no more than 14% alcohol.
- 5010 tax credit for spirits.
- In evaluating the tax reconciliation, the wine volumes had a slightly higher variance than beer or spirits. As an added cross check on wine volumes we looked at a simple inventory flow from 2003 to 2014 to further validate our methodology. This effectively looked at “Opening Inventory” plus “Total Domestic Production” plus “Total Imports” less “exports” less “ending inventory” equals “Wine Entering Distribution”. Click here for a copy of the bw166 Wine Inventory Reconciliation.