Thank you both for replying to my question. I pretty much only do online directly from wineries but retail stores in my area are terrible. To tell the truth, the best local retail wine store is Wray’s IGA (grocery store) that has a semi decent collection of WA and CA but barely anything from OR and a handful of French wines. Costco (which truly sucks in my town for wine) is the second best option. With the anticompetitive ban on out of state retailers, I’ve just avoided them thus far. I’m originally from IL, so I’m used to ridiculous laws limiting consumers’ ability to source locally.
Its strange that a liberal state with a big local wine industry is acting this way.
Especially on the West Coast.
Those policies would seem to be out of step regionally.
Isn’t Utah the only Western state with crummy / no shipping rules?
Well, unfortunately not that strange for WA - since
- big business (costco, etc.) is what brought the private liquor laws
and 2) I would guess that somewhere along the line, some big WA wine group got together to make it more difficult for outside wine to get in - with licensing or what have you… to push more WA wines. But, there’s a lot of pride for WA wine here. Retailers and wine bar workers I know say that causal customers will naturally go for a WA wine. Pride in localization, etc. So you can say it’s been “successful”.
I wonder if it’s the same for beer geeks. My guess is yes.
And spirit heads will have the same thing once one of those places gets bought by some large corp.
Didn’t Washington impose prohibition before national prohibition? If IRCC WA also segregated men and women from drinking together at establishments that served alcohol.
Just pointing out the silliness of stereotyping.
My local wine shop got a threat for a several thousand dollar fine when shipping wine to another state (can’t remember which one). so I also suspect the there was a cease and desist letter with a threatened fine and whoever shipped it pulled it back.
I don’t know of any state where it is legal to ship beer over state lines besides Oregon. It doesn’t really matter since neither FedEx or UPS will ship beer if they know it’s beer.
That’s interesting. Had no idea Beer was treated different than wine… how does Tavour ship?
Are you referring to retail to customer?
I was guessing on the difficulty of getting beer shipped into WA to then sell. I’ve seen Heater Allen here, so maybe you can inform on if WA is tougher to ship into as opposed to other states (tougher meaning: more paperwork, higher taxes, additional requirements, something like that)?
To your Q, I’ve long wondered the same thing because I thought beer was treated different than wine.
The United States currently has Fair Trade Agreements with 20 other countries. As an American wine retailer, I can legally ship to 8 states and the District of Columbia. Using a qualified exporter/shipper, I can ship to those 20 countries and another 21 countries.
The funny part of it is we get a lot of orders for older WA wines, from people in WA, that we won’t be able to fulfill. Go figure?
I stand corrected. Ship Compliant says I can ship to 14 states and the District of Columbia. I exaggerated?
Washington State has no income tax, and is hungry for any other source of revenue. I’d say it is mostly about tax collection. Sure, they can compel large retailers like wine.com to submit sales taxes, but mostly that avenue doesn’t work. Thus, the meat ax approach.
Data point in case it is of use- about 7 years ago when I moved, I sold a lot of nice things to friends around the country, including wine.
I took several packages to UPS at once, and somehow a small box of wine destined for CA and a similar sized box of something else destined for WA state got their labels mixed up.
UPS called me from the receiving station in WA very upset and belligerent. I explained the situation, apologized profusely and asked if I could be granted a one-time exemption to have a friend retrieve the package.
They did finally agree because it was their mixup, but they were not pleasant about it and took great pains to remind me that they had the right to destroy the package if they wanted to.
Not an entirely perfect analogy to the situation- but do note that someone out there, even on a UPS mistake, almost got wine destroyed when it got into WA several years ago.
Also note based on my story that it is very likely UPS gave the retailer the same grilling I got, and only after the package arrived at destination, with return of package the only alternative to destruction. I was specifically told the ONLY reason they let a friend get my package was that UPS was not able to prove that the mixup of the packages was my error versus their own.