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I can't ship wine!

SLOLindsay

By SLOLindsay
in Wine

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SLOLindsay

SLOLindsay

Posted
Posted

I went to three different places today to try to ship two bottles of local California wine (packaged in styrofoam) to my in-laws in Wisconsin, where it is legal to send wine. Or at least, it was. Suddenly, nobody will ship my wine!! UPS won't, FedEx won't, and the US Postal Service certainly won't.

They say there's some sort of certification now, that it came down at the beginning of the month "like a hammer," that they'll be fined thousands of dollars if they send my two bottles. UPS drivers, they said, won't even touch it if it looks like wine. Did something happen I was in the dark about?

I've been sending wine to people in Michigan, Ohio, New York and Washington too, and I've never had this problem before. I'm worried I won't be able to send wine at all anymore. What's going on?!

:sad:

"I can sit down, resolved to be moderate, determined to eat and drink lightly, and be there three hours later, nursing my wine and still open to temptation."

Peter Mayle, Toujours Provence

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Carolyn Tillie

Carolyn Tillie

Posted
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Here in Napa, there are a number of licensed shippers that will do it for you (Buffalo, St. Helena Mail Center, Aero, just to name a few). Maybe there is something similar in SLO because you are near the wine industry of PR and SB.

The "certification" is not new, but is now being enforced (according to my FedEx rep). It all has to due with the argument currently under consideration by the Supreme Court. This is why the big shipping companies have had to buckle down on the regulations that were already in place but basically being ignored. I was told that (in a nut shell) *someone* shipped a wine to an address. Without the proper certification, a minor was able to sign for the package and this was part of the argument why inter-state shipping should not be allowed.

There are a couple of HUGE threads on this issue from uber wine geeks and folks like me who are in the business

here

and

here

Edited by Carolyn Tillie (log)

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Rebel Rose

Rebel Rose

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Wisconsin is still a reciprocal state. The only difference is that some carriers are not allowing private individuals to ship wine. Primarily, I think, because many (most?) private individuals are not aware of state shipping laws. So for now only licensed wine shippers can package and ship via common carriers.

Some UPS packaging stores are licensed to ship wine. If anyone is interested in shipping wine, you should call around and find a packaging store that can do it for you. And if you're lucky enough to live in wine country, you can always find a friendly winery with a Wisconsin registration and UPS wine shipper's contract who'll send it for you. :wink:

Also, this is a useful link for anyone with questions about shipping wine to another state. Just click on the color coded map and it will link you to a synopsis of each state's shipping laws.

http://www.wineinstitute.org/shipwine/

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jbonne

jbonne

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so by my reading of that FedEx missive, a private citizen can ship certain biohazards, blood and many toxic chemicals using FedEx, but not wine?

this begs to be written about.

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Rebel Rose

Rebel Rose

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so by my reading of that FedEx missive, a private citizen can ship certain biohazards, blood and many toxic chemicals using FedEx, but not wine?

this begs to be written about.

No kidding. I have a wine club member who is a pharmacist. He thinks it ridiculous that pills can be sent in the mail, where they'll sit in sunbaked mailboxes, and where skateboarding kids passing by can swipe them, but he can't have wine delivered directly to his door.

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jbonne

jbonne

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Posted
this begs to be written about.

Trust me, it has been written about -- almost ad nauseum but it is only wine geeks who are reading...

not direct shipping overall, but about the apparently new FedEx crackdown on *personal* shipments, which never were a prior focus on coverage. if it's been written about, it hasn't been anywhere i saw. and i get flooded with this stuff.

to me, a personal prohibition is far more offensive than the winery shipping issue.

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jbonne

jbonne

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Posted

on a related note (but wholly unrelated to yesty's SCOTUS decision), the San Luis Obispo Tribune has penned something on the personal-shipping issue, though they note that UPS has also fallen prey to this bizarro policy.

With nearly 4,000 stores and 384,000 employees, UPS is the third-largest non-government employer in the United States. Steve Holmes, a spokesman for UPS headquarters in Atlanta, said the company needed to clarify its policies because local shop owners like Enoch were caught in the patchwork of wine-shipping regulations that often differed from state to state.
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