October 15 2007
I love my home state, really I do, despite the plentiful warts. I feel like the most we have going for us sometimes is some basketball fandom, the movie Hoosiers, the movie Rudy, the Indy 500, the Colts and corn. If I was 10 years older, I might also cite the movie Breaking Away, but you gotta draw the line somewhere. Oh, and we have a really incredible cost of living, too—likely because of my first point in which two of your five selling points are movies that are 15 years old or more, but who is quibbling about inexpensive housing?
And, man, Gene Hackman was awesome in Hoosiers … even if the best line in the movie goes to Dennis Hopper’s character, Shooter Flatch, when he draws up a play as the Assistant Coach pressed into action called the “picket fence” and tells his team: “Don’t get caught watchin’ the paint dry.”
Ah, such are the small joys in life … good movies and a nice glass of wine.
I used to bemoan the fact that we couldn’t get any wine in the state. All out of state consumer shipments of wine were illegal. We were left with the wine that our six or seven distributors carried, which left out about 97% of the wine available.
When you think of wine, Indiana is probably far down the list in terms of desirability for a wine producer and our smaller pool of distributors made it even less desirable.
But, alas no more!
Last month I wrote about recent legislation in Indiana allowing direct shipping (here and here) and immediately run into a buzzsaw of confusion. The net-net of the situation is that the Indiana ATC, in the wake of a judges ruling allowing direct shipping, had some opaqueness about responsibility for a consumer cap—no consumer could receive more than 24 cases in a year, but who is responsible for tracking? The winery? The consumer?
In the wake of that confusion, it was the stance of the Wine Institute for wineries not to ship lest they put their federal license in jeopardy.
No, wait!!!! Please ship to Indiana I exhorted!
And, while I would love to take credit, in reality, I had nothing to do with it. The fact is Wine Institute did some magic with our ATC, the leader of whom, David Heath, is an alleged ex-law enforcement guy and not prone to flights of consumer advocacy. Their regionally placed lobbyist, Nino Ciaravino (great name!) and Wine Institute local counsel, John Keeler, met with the ATC to define that the consumer was responsible for their own purchasing activities, and not the winery.
This is incredibly significant because wineries were taking the approach that risk, any risk, was bad and therefore not shipping, despite the favorable consumer ruling.
If our Governor didn’t have strict rules regarding gifts from vendors, I might think that the Wine Institute showed up to talk with the ATC with some Colgin, Bryant Family and Screaming Eagle. However, whatever goodwill that was built was earned the hard way—through conversations with mildly reasonable people.
There aren’t too many free passes around this blog, but I honestly have to say that the Wine Institute does as fine of job of advocating on behalf of its membership as any association that I have seen or been associated with. Kudos to them for bringing some sanity to this situation and for finally, blessedly, allowing a freakin’ consumer to have wine shipped to their door.
This feels good—like hitting a 20 foot jumper from the baseline to wine, er, win the game.
Thanks to Wine Institute for not letting the paint dry!
*thanks to Jeff Carroll at Six88 for the head’s up on these developments. See his blog post here.
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