How to Tailor Your Employee Handbook for Winery Production Facilities
A generic winery employee handbook might check the compliance box, but it won’t guide a bottling line misfire, keep your cellar team safe when crushing, or clarify who handles what during a high-pressure tasting event.
If your winery handles in-house production — barrel storage, fermentation, bottling, warehousing, or all of the above — your handbook should reflect that. It's a proactive reference that sets expectations, outlines responsibilities, and helps everyone understand how safety, accountability, conduct, and efficiency show up on the floor.
In my work with winery founders, I’ve helped design handbooks that do more than explain vacation policy. We look at safety protocols tailored to winemaking, regulatory compliance tied to alcohol production, labor expectations that account for cellar conditions, communication structures that hold teams together, and how your values show up across it all.
Include Winery-Specific Safety Protocols
Winery production safety policies need to reflect what’s happening on your floor. Pressurized tanks, forklift traffic, and chemical exposure aren’t abstract risks; they’re part of the job. A handbook that captures these realities in clear, enforceable terms is a powerful, useful tool.
Picture your team cleaning out a fermenter at the end of a long shift. Carbon dioxide levels are rising, the tank hatch is open, and everyone’s trying to wrap up quickly. When the handbook spells out the confined space entry protocol, no one has to make judgment calls under pressure.
List your nonnegotiables — PPE expectations, lockout/tagout for bottling equipment, safe storage and handling of sanitizers, authorized forklift users, and how those users are certified. Written policies like these align with OSHA standards and give your staff clarity, reduce injury risk, and support accountability.
When the language is simple and specific, your team understands what’s expected, whether they’re topping barrels in July or running glycol lines during harvest. And I’ve seen precisely how that kind of clarity can keep workers safe.
Address Alcohol Industry Regulations and Compliance
Winery HR compliance reaches deep into the legal frameworks that govern how wine is made. For production teams, the line between routine cellar work and regulatory exposure is thinner than many realize.
Let’s say your team forgets to log a cleaning cycle for the bottling line or misplaces the transfer record for a high-alcohol blend. It could compromise your compliance standing with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. These types of mistakes are surprisingly common when staff aren’t trained to see how their day-to-day actions support regulatory oversight.
Your handbook should spell out how each of these areas ties back to compliance with employment law, using language that’s direct and grounded in actual winery operational procedures:
Alcohol handling: Staff should understand bonded space limitations, labeling laws, and restrictions around sampling.
TTB recordkeeping: Clarify who logs production volumes, tank transfers, and blend formulas.
Sanitation logs: Specify how cleaning cycles are documented and who reviews them.
Label approvals: Reinforce the importance of using only approved certificates of label approvals and what to do if changes are needed.
Wastewater reporting: Describe local requirements for discharge tracking and what production staff must document.
Include policy statements that highlight accountability. For example, all fermentation log entries must be completed daily and signed by the cellar lead before shift end. When your team understands how their paperwork connects to licensing and legal obligations, compliance becomes part of the production culture — not a check-box exercise that can easily get missed.
Set Expectations for Shift Work, Overtime, and Physical Labor
In my experience, the wineries that retain great production staff are the ones that write handbooks based on what actually happens during crush, not what looks tidy on paper. Winery operations simply aren’t built around nine-to-five routines. Cellar crews often jump between early morning punch-downs, midday bottling runs, and late-night fermenter transfers.
What's more, production schedules change with the fruit. That’s why your handbook needs policy language that accounts for shifting demands, especially during harvest. Define what peak season means for your operation. Be specific about how you handle shift rotations, call-ins, swaps, and overtime. For example, you might write, "During harvest, shifts may exceed 10 hours and include weekends. Overtime pay applies after 8 hours per day in accordance with California labor law."
Physical labor should also be acknowledged, not assumed. Spell out that cellar work demands repetitive lifting, prolonged standing, walking on wet floors, and exposure to cold or heat. Include a section that invites employees to speak up about limitations or injuries before they become hazards.
In short, transparent policies reduce surprises, and clarity builds trust. Workers who know what to expect are more likely to show up, stay motivated, take pride in compliance, and raise concerns early.
Clarify Communication, Reporting, and Chain of Command
Without clear communication policies, even a highly skilled production team can drift into confusion — or worse, conflict. Your winery employee handbook should map out who speaks to whom, how instructions move through the team, and what steps to follow when something goes sideways.
Structured communication isn't about bureaucracy. Instead, it helps prevent errors that affect time, your product, or safety. Imagine your press operator hears a rattle in the line but doesn’t know who to alert — or assumes someone else already has. Now the issue goes unaddressed, the problem escalates, and the next shift inherits the mess.
Your handbook should include precise, actionable language. Here’s how that might look:
All cellar staff report directly to the cellar lead during production shifts. Questions about equipment, safety, reporting, or process flow should go to the cellar lead first.
If an employee observes a safety hazard, it must be reported immediately to their direct supervisor. If the supervisor is unavailable, report to the person with the highest-ranking position present in the building. (Make sure you have a clear chain of command outlined in your handbook.)
Daily work plans are reviewed during the morning team huddle, with updates communicated via the shared shift log.
All incidents, including near misses, injuries, or equipment failures, must be logged before the end of the shift. Logs are reviewed by management weekly.
Add Winery Culture and Values to Reinforce Buy-In
Your employee handbook for production staff doesn’t have to read as though it came from a corporate HR office. It can reflect your identity, including the hands-on craftsmanship, the sustainability choices, the obsessive focus on quality, and the attention to long-term stewardship that define how you run your operation.
When production staff see those values woven into their day-to-day policies, they’re more likely to feel they’re part of something meaningful.
If you’ve built your reputation on minimal intervention, the handbook can call that out in a note on chemical use, fermentation control, or equipment calibration. If your brand stands for environmental stewardship, spell out what that looks like in barrel rinsing practices, water usage, or waste disposal. These connections matter. They tell your team how your company does things and why.
You don’t need to write a long essay. A short mission section upfront — written in your voice — sets the tone. Throughout the document, link values to specific expectations:
Quality: Staff should flag any detail, regardless of size, that could impact the wine.
Sustainability: Water conservation practices are mandatory during equipment cleaning.
Teamwork: Each shift begins with a 5-minute huddle to align team members on goals and concerns.
When values are written into the handbook, they become part of how the work gets done.
Build a Better Winery Employee Handbook for a Safer, Stronger Team
A winery employee handbook built around real cellar conditions keeps your operation steady under pressure. When fermentation tanks are gassing off, a valve seizes mid-shift, your best forklift driver calls in sick, or a sanitation record is missing, a solid handbook provides structure, not guesswork.
Your team needs practical guidance tied directly to how they work without vague promises or recycled HR templates.
I’ve seen what happens when wineries build handbooks that reflect actual production challenges. Safety improves. Accountability sticks. And employees feel someone is paying attention to what they're dealing with.
If you’re ready to use your employee handbook as a tool to support your crew and protect your business, Balanced Business Group is here to help. We specialize in winery HR compliance and know how to translate your workflows into policies that hold the right people accountable.
Check out our Annual Compliance Checklist for Wineries to see if there's anything you've missed this year. Want to talk it through? Let’s connect and get to work.
Author: Pedro Noyola
Pedro Noyola is the CEO of Balanced Business Group (BBG), a company dedicated to helping Founders in the CPG food and beverage industry gain financial confidence. At BBG, Pedro combines traditional accounting with tailored financial guidance, providing industry-specific insights to ensure sustainable growth for passionate food entrepreneurs. He is also an angel investor and a mentor to emerging CPG brands via SKU and TIG Collective. Pedro’s career spans leadership roles at FluentStream, where he helped the company achieve recognition as one of the Fastest Growing Companies in America by Inc., and Telogis, where he was part of a team that grew the company’s recurring revenue from $50 million to $1.2 billion in under five years.
Pedro holds a BA and MPA from The University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is an active member of the Young Presidents Organization, continually seeking growth in both leadership and learning. Outside of work, Pedro enjoys family time and outdoor activities, drawing personal fulfillment from his roles as a husband and father.
