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Saturday, June 19, 2010

Law - Four Indiana congressmen sign on to liquor distributors' nationwide anti-wine-shipping bill

Congress is considering legislation, proposed by wholesale distributors, that could limit wineries' ability to sell and ship directly to consumers, according to a May 14, 2010 Washington Post story quoted in this ILB entry. There is more detail in this May 5th entry.

All of that is brought home to Indiana by this week's "Uncorked" column by Dan and Krista Stockman in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. The Stockmans write about "the influence that the nation’s liquor distributors wield when it comes to protecting their legal monopoly" and note that, until now, "those efforts by distributors have been piecemeal, state by state.," but no longer:

On April 15, U.S. Rep. Bill Delahunt, R-Mass., a Republican from Massachusetts, introduced a bill written by a liquor distributors’ trade group. The bill attempts to make it basically impossible to challenge state laws regulating alcohol shipping, even if they are blatantly discriminatory against other states.

See, many states, including Indiana, used to have laws that allowed in-state wineries to ship wine directly to customers but prohibited out-of-state wineries from doing so. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 said the Constitution’s Commerce Clause prohibits states from discriminating against each other that way. Either allow all wineries to ship or no wineries to ship, the court said.

This new bill would not only make that kind of discrimination OK but also spells out that there is almost no way to challenge that discrimination.

Certainly no upstanding members of Congress would fall for such a charade, would they? Well, 118 members of the House have so far, signing on as co-sponsors.

From Indiana, Rep. Andre Carson, Rep. Joe Donnelly, Rep. Brad Ellsworth (who is running for the U.S. Senate) and Rep. Peter Visclosky have all signed on. * * *

It is small, family wineries and people who love their wines that would suffer, while the only ones to gain would be big distributors that would see what is already a legal monopoly and make it an unassailable, unchallengeable monopoly.

And do you think that monopoly will not run roughshod over small wineries and their customers? Remember, this is the same group that already was willing to put every winery in Indiana out of business – and your General Assembly, which calls itself pro-business, pro-small business, pro-family business, pro-farm, pro-tourism and pro-agri-tourism, was ready to do it for them.

It was only because of your calls and letters that their first effort was – barely – stopped, and even then it resulted in a compromise that is still hobbling Indiana’s wineries to this day, to the point that one winery went out of business because of it.

So while you sit there and read this, you may be getting mad, you may be getting outraged, you may be telling your significant other to read it and post it on Facebook or Tweet it, but are you angry enough to pick up the phone and call Ellsworth or Visclosky or Donnelly or Carson? Angry enough to write a letter?

The ILB has many earlier entries on wine shipping - see the list here.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 19, 2010 09:07 PM
Posted to General Law Related