Home Wine Making – Is It Legal

The benefits of home wine making are plenty. It makes a great hobby, it can be fun to make something with your own hands that you can consume, you can make wines to suite your taste and best of all, the wine you make will be less expensive then buying from a store or wine shop. All of that aside, the question still remains, is making homemade wine legal, if it is, how much can you legally make? These questions will be answered in this article.

To start with, in 1919, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, enacted prohibition, which made home brewing in the US illegal. In 1933 the 21st Amendment repealed prohibition legalizing making wine at home, but left out home beer making. This Amendment predominantly leaves regulation of alcohol to the states, which means it is still up to individual states to legalize home brewing in their state codes, even though it is federally legal.

The majority of states have legalized home wine making, but the laws vary widely. In 1978 President Jimmy Carter signed into law a bill, which made beer brewed at home for personal or family use tax exempt and allowed certain amounts of alcoholic beverages to be legally brewed in US homes. This bill actually went into effect February 1979.

Though the bill technically refers to beer, some added amendments allows for other alcoholic beverages to be brewed within legal boundaries. Depending on your marital status the bill allows between 100 and 200 gallons of homebrew to be made per year.

Single individuals are allowed 100 gallons per year while married couples can make 200 gallons per year. Keep in mind you are not allowed to sell your homebrew unless you get the standard license offered to alcoholic beverage retailers. You must also be 18 years old to make wine and you must be of legal drinking age to drink it.

There are still some states where it's illegal to brew alcoholic beverages at home. States like Idaho, where only beer that's made from in state materials is legal and Utah, where under no circumstances can a citizen brew alcoholic products without a license from the state, feel they can better police this issue on their own.