Online Wine Sales & The End of Western Civilization
By Tom Wark
Four or five years ago, in the midst of the political and legal battles over the direct shipment of wine, you would occasionally hear of a “sting” operation in which some government organization — usually in league with wine wholesalers — would demonstrate that minors could obtain alcohol by mail.
Each instance was usually heralded as substantive proof that the danger of online sales of wine was so great that kids would die, families would be destroyed and Western Civilization would come to an end if laws were changed to allow Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet to be shipped across country.
We haven’t heard much of these types of stings lately. Yet a fellow wine blogger () alerted me to in Minnesota. Minnesota recently liberalized its wine shipping laws.
The story is fairly typical. A watchdog group orders wine online then waits. When the drivers arrive with the wine it gets dropped off at the house with no signature or it is left with a minor, proving that western civilization is ending.
The fact of the matter is that the risks posed to minors from online wine ordering and home delivery are tiny, and diminishing even further every day as more age-verification software is employed by wineries and online wine stores.
The weak link is probably the delivery services. But the good news there is that this link is easily taken care of via education of the drivers. And this will occur as more wine is shipped across state lines.
It remains a fact of life that 99.9% of all alcohol that gets into the hands of minors first goes through the hands of wholesalers, then through the hands of a brick and mortar retailer. The other obvious weak link is the parents’ liquor cabinet. (A piece of advice: if your father is a bourbon drinker and REALLY likes bourbon, it’s probably not a wise idea to think you can siphon out a bit of the brown liquid and replace it with water….He’ll know. Believe me!)
The reason that in recent years there have been fewer “stings” on online alcohol sellers is because the results rarely prove that online ordering is unsafe and politicians are tired of getting run over by the media — and sometimes by their — for suggesting this is so.
However, the legal wrangling over alcohol sales are again heating up in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision that held a state must treat in-state and out-of-state wine sellers equally. It will be interesting to see how the forces of restriction respond.
