Now you can have your wine and ship it too...
May 27, 2005
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, a number of far-seeing pundits observed that this event represented the real end of the Russian Revolution that started 84 years before. When the Supreme Court ruled last week and wiped away all direct-to-consumer interstate wine shipping regulations, this represented the end of Prohibition in the United States, also a long time coming.By 1920, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution banning alcoholic beverages had led to the Volstead Act that "enforced" it across the land. Thirteen strange and disastrous years later in the midst of the Depression, it was repealed, and American wine culture and industry have been shuddering, insecure, and unsteady ever since.
Before Prohibition, the wine industry in Ohio was widespread and important, but those vineyard lands were turned over to other crops and never went back to grapes. New York wine production is still profound, but nothing like what it was before the 1920s, and imagine where it would be today if it hadn't been interrupted for more than half a century. California is beloved wine territory today, but as late as 1975, the idea -- not the reality -- of California competing with Europe was absurd, an emotional holdover from Prohibition and its aftermath.
In the end, the whole shallow, silly mess should provide a sober warning to people and politicians today who want to amend the Constitution with issues that are essentially subjective, moralistic, and quasi-religious. The 18th Amendment enjoys the distinction of being the only amendment to the Constitution ever repealed, and that required its own amendment, the 21st, just to get it done. Think about that.
In order to gain enough support to repeal national Prohibition, politicians of the day ceded alcoholic beverage control to local government, which is why counties and towns across the US can vote themselves "dry" more or less at will even today. State governments especially took hold of this power, closing interstate borders and legislating a ripe bureaucracy of the viticultural-industrial complex.
By closing state borders to wine shipments from "out of state" -- code for "the winery" -- government created the need for interstate importers, local distributors who could legally ship and deliver inside your state's arbitrary political boundary.
On paper, all of that is wiped away, and we're at the beginning of a new, 21st century relationship with wine. The determined among us can now drink the wines we've always wanted, but could never get in our local wine shops. Amazon inked a big deal with Wine.com right in time, so the possibility of zillions of people buying wine like they do paperbacks is awe-inspiring.
Objections that shipping wine will somehow facilitate underage drinking are -- how to put this? -- idiotic. Anyone who knows teenagers knows they do not plan and schedule well, especially taboo behaviors. Underage drinkers simply are not going to order fine wine online to get blasted five to seven business days from now; it's not in their nature.
I'm very much looking forward to what all this might mean on restaurant wine lists. If you're a small restaurant only ordering a case or three of wine now and then, no one's giving you a price break anyway. Now that it's possible, why not carry exactly what you want by going direct? Or perhaps restaurateurs will augment their lists with direct buying of special wines.
Prohibition's 85 year long hold on American wine culture has ended with this Supreme Court ruling, and other peripheral wine laws will surely fall now as well. As these legal walls come down, figurative walls in our culture will also crumble, and about 100 years after Prohibition, we'll be essentially right back where we started and ready to try again.
That's good news for post-modern wine lovers and excellent news for wine delivery companies.
May Flowers
2004 Davis Family Vineyards "Gusto" Sauvignon Blanc (about $20, last week only in Chicago, Boston, and New York, but today available to the rest of the country at www.davisfamilyvineyards.com)Guy Davis makes this awesomely delicious sauvignon blanc from two different vineyards in New Zealand. One is right by the water and very cold, and the other is in a warm inland valley. The seaside grapes provide bright, zippy acidity, and the riper valley grapes give this wine weight and body you don't see in other NZSB. Gusto's balance is superb; the wine is both explosive and deep at the same time. Tropical citrus fruit goes from zero to 60 in no time, but it's also got a low center of gravity. I would serve this wine nice and cold with as many raw oysters as I could eat.
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