California's bottle bill now covers wine, and the label clock is ticking
SB 1013 pulled wine and spirits into the CRV system in 2024. Since July 1, 2025, bottles need the redemption marking. Tasting-room pours are exempt; everything else is paperwork.
SACRAMENTO: Wine is now a bottle-bill beverage in California. Senate Bill 1013, signed by Governor Newsom in September 2022, expanded the California Redemption Value program to wine and distilled spirits containers effective January 1, 2024, and the compliance obligations have been phasing in ever since.
The money mechanics, per CalRecycle's rules as explained by SevenFifty Daily: distributors pay the redemption value into the state fund on every container sold in California, 5 cents for containers under 24 ounces, 10 cents for 24 ounces and larger, and 25 cents for boxes, bladders, and pouches. The distributor charges the buyer, sends the money to the state minus a 1.5 percent administrative discount, and the consumer gets it back at a redemption center.
The definition of distributor is the part that surprised the trade. It covers any entity, in state or out, that sells directly in California, including wineries selling direct to consumer or to bars, restaurants, and stores without a wholesaler. If you ship DtC into California, you are in the system.
The label deadline has passed. Since July 1, 2025, covered containers must bear the CRV marking, "CA Redemption Value" or an approved variant, with specific size and placement rules by material. A legal memo from Dickenson Peatman and Fogarty notes the one meaningful carve-out: wine sold for on-site consumption in a tasting room is exempt. Everything sold for off-site consumption is in.
The scale is large. The Container Recycling Institute estimates Californians buy about 1.3 billion wine and liquor bottles a year, and projects the expansion adds 500 million containers a year to recycling, lifting the state's glass beverage recycling rate from around 30 percent toward 59 percent.
For winery operators, the bottle bill is now a standing cost of selling in California: reporting, payments to CalRecycle, processing fees by material, and label real estate. The wineries that built it into their 2026 label cycles are fine. The ones still treating it as news have a compliance gap.
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