do you care?

no more self-distribution
no more local wine?
do you care?

[10:27 AM]
I probably have mentioned this before, but Ayeka and my mutual passion/hobby is wine.

Our personal feeling – with one exception (Chateau Ste. Michelle’s Riesling, due to our relationship’s history) – is that we will only buy wine from wineries that we’ve visited. This isn’t usually a problem – we have about eight cases of wine or so in our house, all of it from wineries we’ve visited in Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey and yes, California. (We stopped at a few while we were in Napa after my attendence at JavaOne last year.) My thought is that there’s plenty of good wine that you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg to drink, and it’s locally produced which supports local farm-wineries.

The recent Supreme Court decision, though, skewered a lot of states. Maryland and Virginia, for instance, had laws that permitted in-state farm-wineries to self-distribute if they were too small to get a wholesaler interested, but denied this right to out-of-state wineries. (Meaning an employee of the winery could sell and deliver directly to a restaurant or retailer, rather than having to go through a wholesaler to get into the retail stream.) The decision rendered this unconstitutional (violation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution)… and there’s some hot-shot lawyer out in the Midwest encouraging wineries to sue states that have laws similar to Maryland’s.

So, where a lot of us thought that direct-shipment laws were around the corner… we’re finding our local wineries now in dire trouble. Many of them are too small to get wholesalers (or even make a profit with one), and might go out of business.

What can you do to help? If you live in Maryland or Virginia, contact your state legislators and support the passage of universal self-distribution laws. In Virginia, urge your legislators to support HB 1288 (currently tabled 🙁 ). In Maryland, insist that your legislators support HB 1122 and SB 812, and that they oppose HB 1297 and SB 877 (which would explicitly deny self-distribution). In other states, check to see what the law is and push for laws that support your local wine industry.

Remember – only you can help to keep small, independent farm-wineries in business.

Thank you.