I have read a lot of winery business plans. Most of them open with a beautiful story about family, soil, and a lifelong dream. Then they get to the financials, and the whole thing falls apart on page twelve.
Here is the uncomfortable truth I share with every founder who sits across from me. Lenders do not fund passion. They fund repayment. Your job in a business plan is to prove, with numbers, that the money comes back.
The good news is that this is learnable. I am going to walk you through how to build a plan that survives a banker’s scrutiny, section by section, based on what I see working with wineries every day as a winery cpa.
Start With the Capital Reality, Then Work Backward
Before you write a single word, get honest about the size of the check you need.
According to a 2022 Silicon Valley Bank industry report, over 60% of new winery ventures require more than $1 million in initial capital. If your plan asks for $250,000 to launch a full production facility, an experienced lender stops reading. Underfunded plans signal that you do not understand your own industry.
Timeline matters just as much. Wine has longer capital cycles than almost any other food and beverage business, with 2 to 5 years from investment to revenue for new plantings and 12 to 36 months for production cycles.
Your plan must show, explicitly, how you will manage that long lead time to profitability. Spell out what pays the bills between planting and pouring. Tasting room revenue, purchased fruit programs, custom crush arrangements, or a spouse with a very patient day job. Name it.
Prove You Understand the Cash Flow Gap
This is where most winery plans quietly die.
Grapes, barrels, and labor get paid for today. The revenue from those costs arrives years later. You harvest in September, and that wine may not generate a single dollar of sales until the following summer, or much later if you are aging it.
Lenders who know wine understand this gap. They want to see that you understand it too.
Build a monthly cash flow projection, and let it be ugly where it needs to be. Show the trough. Show the crush season spike in expenses. A plan that shows smooth, even cash flow across twelve months tells a winery lender one thing: that you have never run a winery. We wrote about this dynamic in detail in our post on cash flow in a winery, and it is worth reading before you touch a spreadsheet.
The crush season spike deserves its own lines in your projection. Fruit payments, barrels, and harvest labor tend to land in the same few weeks. If you’re not sure how to model that stretch, our guide to planning cash flow through crush season walks through it. That’s the window a winery lender tends to read most closely.
Give Lenders the Numbers They Actually Scrutinize
Experienced winery lenders look past the executive summary fast. Here is what they dig into.
They want detailed production volume projections tied to financial projections. They want profit and loss statements. And critically for wineries, they want month-by-month revenue breakdowns for the past 2 to 3 years if you are an existing operation, so they can assess annual debt service capacity instead of judging you on a slow-season snapshot.
February looks terrible for almost every tasting room in the country. Lenders know that. Give them the full year so they can see the whole picture.
If you are pre-revenue, your projections need to trace every assumption back to a source. Cases produced, bottle price by channel, depletion rates, club attrition. Vague numbers read as guesses. Sourced numbers read as competence. This is exactly the kind of work solid winery accounting makes possible.
Show a Margin Strategy, Especially Direct to Consumer
Lenders want to see where the profit lives, and in wine, it lives close to the customer.
The most profitable wineries lean heavily on tasting room sales and wine club memberships. Direct-to-consumer channels carry meaningfully higher gross margins than wholesale, with wineries capturing nearly 100% of the retail price when selling directly.
Your plan should break out revenue by channel and show margin by channel. A plan that says “we will sell 5,000 cases” tells a lender nothing. A plan that says “60% DTC at $42 average bottle price, 40% wholesale at $18 FOB” tells a lender you know your own economics.
Let’s look at an example. This is a real situation from our client work, with details kept private. A winery client came to us with a plan built entirely on distribution. On paper, the volume looked impressive. When we rebuilt the model by channel, the wholesale line was losing roughly $4 per bottle after true production costs. Shifting the plan toward club and tasting room sales turned the same production volume into a fundable business. Same wine, same cases, completely different loan conversation.
Match Your Funding Request to the Right Loan Structure
The funding request section is where founders often leave money on the table.
SBA 504 loans for wineries require only 15% down, compared to conventional financing that can demand 35% to 50%. On a multi-million-dollar loan, that difference frees up serious capital for staff salaries, marketing, and the inventory you will sit on for two years.
Name the loan structure you are pursuing in the plan. State the amount, the use of funds line by line, the collateral, and your repayment source. Specificity here signals that you have done the homework, and lenders reward homework.
The Sections Your Plan Needs, In Order
Here is the full framework I recommend:
1. Executive summary, written last, with the funding ask in the first paragraph.
2. Company description, including licensing status with TTB and your state agency.
3. Market analysis, with a defined target customer and real local competition data.
4. Organization and management, showing who handles finance, because someone must.
5. Product line, by label and SKU, with cost per bottle.
6. Marketing and sales strategy, broken out by channel.
7. Funding request, with structure and use of funds.
8. Financial projections, monthly for years one and two, quarterly after.
9. Appendix, with permits, leases, and vineyard contracts.
One more thing worth saying. Writing this plan forces a rigorous look at your own operation. Most founders discover a broken assumption somewhere in the process, and that discovery is valuable whether or not you ever submit the plan to a bank.
Get the Numbers Right Before the Bank Sees Them
A business plan can very well make the difference between funding and a polite rejection. The wineries that get funded are the ones whose numbers hold up under a second and third read.
If you want experienced winery accountants to pressure test your projections before a lender does, reach out to us at https://llamasfinancial.com/contact-us/.
And if you enjoyed this article, you will get a lot out of our post on cash flow in a winery, which covers the exact timing gap that makes winery financing so tricky in the first place.
