On wine? I thought I was told WA had high spirit/liquor taxes , but not wine. If there is a high wine excise how does Garagiste exist- they are in WA I thinK?
Chuck,
WA may have high taxes, but when it comes to Champagne pricing, they are a small pimple on the ass of Godzilla, ie, irrelevant.
Dan Kravitz
Yes, still high. More than 4 times the rate of CA, coupled with other restrictions that some states don’t have that make it hard to compete. In many cases, it was cheaper for a private collector to buy in CA at retail than the WA wholesale price. Some regs were relaxed when we privatized hard alcohol sales, but WA retailers still operate at a disadvantage.
Not following the logic here. Yes, we are a pimple, but whatever amount of Champagne we sell here in WA, no matter how small, is taxed at a fairly high rate compared to other states.
Think he’s talking about the amount of the tax relative to the price of the champagnes.JMTC
Chuck, when you say alcohol taxes are 4 times higher in WA than in CA, what does that come out to in dollars for a bottle of, say, 14% ABV wine?
The 6.5% sales tax wouldn’t affect the retail cost. The federal excise tax applies to every state. The WA excise tax of 87c oer gallon is the only WA specific tax that would affect the final retail list price. 5 bottles in a gallon means this tax raises the final retail price by 17.4 cents per bottle…
I’m in Chuck’s camp. As far as I can tell, I pay almost 9% sales tax on every bottle. That doesn’t seem insubstantial.
WT
Sales tax on alcohol is 9% in MD and 10.25% in DC, so from my perspective 9% doesn’t seem higher than “normal.” WA’s 6.5% is a relative bargain.
Sales tax has nothing to do with it, although WA does have a high sales tax rate (due to no income tax). Troy, the excise tax is not added at the retail level, but at an earlier tier, raising the cost at each tier, and getting marked up at each subsequent tier. The net effect might be more like 40-50 cents, which isn’t much on a bottle of Champagne, but can be significant on a low priced wine. But taxes are just one factor as to why WA has never been the cheapest place to buy wine.
Taxes aside, I don’t think Fat Cork is trying to be a bargain basement retailer. If you already know what you want, and how to source it, there are almost surely cheaper places to buy. But when I’ve bought from them in the past, it’s because they brought my attention to some things I hadn’t tried before, and I found that to be a service worth paying for (at least to the extent that I wasn’t motivated to use their site to identify stuff, and then go to wine-searcher to find the same thing cheaper elsewhere). YMMV.