The Stockton Record reports that while a US Supreme Court ruling earlier this year theoretically opened the door to direct wine shipments across the country – enabling small wineries to ship directly to consumers and bypass distributors that didn’t want to carry their products – there has been, in fact, “no flood of sales” bolstering the industry.
The Supreme Court actually ruled that states could not allow in-state direct shipments while banning such shipments from out-of-state.
The problem now is that states looking to allow out-of-state shipments have to “develop rules, requirements and fees to apply to interstate direct-to-consumer wine sales,” the Record writes.
"When a state opens up, it's not as if the winery begins immediately shipping a lot more wine into that market," Jeremy Benson, executive director of Free the Grapes! and an advocate of direct wine sales, tells the paper. "What happens is that, ... over the course of a few years, those shipments begin to increase as the wineries begin to build these markets.”
The Supreme Court actually ruled that states could not allow in-state direct shipments while banning such shipments from out-of-state.
The problem now is that states looking to allow out-of-state shipments have to “develop rules, requirements and fees to apply to interstate direct-to-consumer wine sales,” the Record writes.
"When a state opens up, it's not as if the winery begins immediately shipping a lot more wine into that market," Jeremy Benson, executive director of Free the Grapes! and an advocate of direct wine sales, tells the paper. "What happens is that, ... over the course of a few years, those shipments begin to increase as the wineries begin to build these markets.”
- KC's View:
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One of the consequences of this new law is that many retailers are going to have to be a lot more aggressive and innovative about finding new sources of product and creating information streams for their customers. It no longer will be enough just to sell what distributors want to distribute…the world will be the competition.
It will be the retailers that embrace this as an opportunity that stand the best chance of coming out of it as big winners.
