Dianna Dapkins thought the Internet would be the perfect place to find a rare Croatian wine that her local merchants in rural Shelburne, Mass., don't stock.
Sure enough, K&L Wine Merchants, an Internet retailer that also has stores in Hollywood and San Francisco, sells the Plenkovic Zlatan Plavac Barrique for $34.99. Dapkins clicked on the wine to buy it but said she was stunned when the website would not let her complete the sale.
"It is really frustrating," she said.
As Dapkins found out, Massachusetts state law blocks out-of-state retailers from shipping wine to its residents. And it's not the only state that puts a cork on interstate wine sales.
In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court gave wineries more freedom to ship their wares to customers in other states. But the ruling did not apply to retailers -- whether they be digital or bricks and mortar -- and they're crying foul.
A complex system of state laws enables customers in some states to order Cabernet Sauvignon directly from the Ladera Howell Mountain winery in the Napa Valley, but not the identical vintage from the St. Helena Wine Center, a retailer just a few miles down the mountainside.
In its landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled that states must allow out-of-state wineries to ship directly to residents if they gave their own wineries direct shipping rights.
Now 36 states and the District of Columbia allow wineries to ship directly to residents, although those rights are sometimes limited to just a few cases of wine annually or are accorded only to small wineries, said the Wine Institute, the major trade group for the California wine industry.
But the decision only addressed wineries. Retailers can ship to just 14 states, and that will drop to 13 this summer when an Illinois law takes effect prohibiting the practice, said Tom Wark, executive director of the Sacramento-based Specialty Wine Retailers Assn.
"We have been able to ship wine to Illinois since we started our e-commerce site back in 2000, but because of new state legislation, we are going to lose that privilege," said David Richards, executive vice president of the Concord, Calif.-based Beverages & More chain.
Such restrictions are generally supported by wine wholesalers and distributors, who see any relaxing of the rules as an assault on a distribution system that has served them profitably since the end of Prohibition in 1933.
