About Eva Bedolla
Owner & CEO, WineCompliance.com
Eva Bedolla is a native of Napa Valley and has been involved in the wine industry for most of her adult life. Her parents emigrated from Michoacan, Mexico in 1959 and settled in Yountville where her father was hired as the first Domaine Chandon employee. During summer breaks from school, Eva began working the harvest at Chandon as Weigh Master and in the early 1980s began working full-time in Shipping, preparing export documents, tracking inventories and assisting with shipping orders out to customers internationally.
She was later promoted to the Compliance, Accounting and Finance Department. There she prepared monthly operations reports for both spirits and wine for the Alcohol, Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) and the California Board of Equalization (BOE). She processed wine tax reports and prepared for audits both internal and government-led. She balanced two million dollars of wine taxes and performed both internal and external account reconciliations. She developed a strong rapport with government agencies and uses that rapport to this day to serve her clients. Soon she took responsibility for tracking harvest records, maintaining grape purchase and sale contracts, and overseeing grower payments and harvest billing.
Eva moved on to Beringer Wine Estates in the late 1990s. She took responsibility for monthly shipping reports, licenses, and registrations, and provided compliance consulting to all record keepers at Beringer's domestic wineries. She advised production and marketing staff of federally allowed operation processes regarding wine blending and qualifying appellations in order to ensure accurate wine labeling. In 1999 the BATF TTB commended Eva's record keeping as being 100% complete and error-free.
While at Beringer Eva prepared government-required transfer documents for winery acquisitions and prepared all start-up documents for new retail, winery and storage facilities. During the purchase of Beringer Wine Estates by Foster's Wine Group, Eva prepared documents to transfer the import brands over to the new merged company.
In 2001 Eva hired on as Compliance Department Manager at Southcorp Wines (now part of Fosters), an importer of Australian wines such as Penfolds, Lindemans, and Rosemount. Soon she discovered and corrected an $88,000 error in previous tax reporting. She handled daily compliance review including license and permit updates, label review and approval, price posting, distributor contracts and territory assignments, monthly shipping reports, export documents, daily coordination with international offices as well as research and troubleshooting. She wrote a compliance procedures manual and provided training and mentoring to her staff.
While at Southcorp she disccovered a $200,000+ tax liability error. She provided all the necessary information to correct the error in the software, and she developed new procedures of "checks and balances" to avoid any further costly errors.
Eva makes it a priority to stay up-to-date on the latest winery and compliance issues. Eva regularly attends seminars on winery operations, direct shipping, changing state requirements, the FDA's bioterrorism requirements, label submissions, appellations, and direct shipping in the alcoholic beverage industry.
Eva has been involved with trade organizations such as the National Association of Beverage Importers, Inc. (NABI ), the National Alcoholic Beverage Control Association (NABCA) and the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) .
A resident of Napa for 25 years, Eva has deep roots in her community and has volunteered as a board member for the Napa County Arts Council and Caring for Yountville's Children. Currently she is a member of Women for WineSense and Family Winemakers of California. She is fluent in Spanish as well as English.
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