Christmas Wine Shipping

[Rebel Rose]

The San Francisco Chronicle experiments with personal shipping:

Shipping wine? Don't ask, don't tell

Now here's a different question: Can you ship wine to your friends, regardless of where in the United States they live?

The answer seems to be yes. As an experiment, two bottles of wine each were shipped last week to people in Florida, New Jersey and Tennessee -- all states to which such shipping is not (or not yet) completely legal.

Three major common carriers were used: DHL, FedEx and UPS. Three different means of delivering the packages to the companies were also used: dropping one each at a carrier outlet, a large office-supply store and a small neighborhood private mailbox company. The shipping boxes weren't labeled as containing wine, but nobody asked about the contents, either.

Do you plan to ship wine for Christmas?

[JohnL]

It is a little known (I think) fact that Cuban cigars are regularly shipped via mails from Canada and switzerland etc--reputable shops in these countries will take orders and ship.

Also--Diamonds are shipped from South Africa to the US jewelry industry via Parcel Post from Europe. The anonymity afforded a package in the postal system is a guarantee of safety.

(I am not sure I have that level of trust in our postal service but....)

[Adrienne Carmack]

My husband's a wine broker and they ship all of their wines direct to customers. I don't know what the laws are, but they can only ship to some states. Also, in some states, people receive their wine within days, but others (including Florida, where we live), it takes 4 weeks because of some sort of processing they have to go through. I don't know if the rules are different for companies such as his than for individuals like us.

Regardless, we're just going to carry a few bottles of wine for gifts (and drinking) on the plane when we fly back to Texas for the holidays.

[Rebel Rose]

Letters to the Editor at the San Francisco Chronicle clarify the new rules . . . UPS' PR person corrects erroneous information provided by, not surprisingly, UPS. Steve Gross from the Wine Institute also weighs in with some additional info, and readers complain about the new shipping rules.