(Wines&Vines) - Earlier this month ShipCompliant, the Boulder-based company known for its direct-to-consumer compliance tools for wineries, released a new product. LabelSmart provides searchable information and photos of every alcoholic beverage label approved by the federal government since 2000.

Wines & Vines took an extended test drive in LabelSmart and found too much information to digest in a single sitting. For example, since 2000 the Department of the Treasury’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) has approved 1,103,623 wine labels for U.S. sales from all over the world. If nothing else, this is evidence that the worldwide wine industry is a complex category. By contrast, spirits labels numbered 92,478; malt beverages 104,439.

Researchers can easily refine the data, drilling down by year(s), months or days. Figures from the past year show a similar pattern: wine labels, 94,116; spirits, 9,247, and malt beverages, 14,810. Identifying trends is one useful aspect of LabelSmart.

Refining search results is not limited to dates. Choose a category (wine) and then select your target: brands, company, fanciful names, origin, varietals, appellations or class types. Each category provides numbers and then shows all the labels within it.

Since even a single year will probably yield hundreds of labels in any given category, searchers can also get more specific. For instance, although the notorious and once wildly popular critter brands have supposedly dwindled in recent years, contenders continue to apply. In the past year 17 brands featured verbiage or imagery related in some way to the word “duck.”

Who will use it?
Tom Wark, who issued the invitation for the test drive, has been handling ShipCompliant’s media relations for the past four years. A longtime, vocal proponent of the DTC movement, he analyzes and writes compliance material for the company.