May 31 2008
A critical impediment with the direct shipping issue in the wine industry is compliance. Though, it is not compliance from a “oh, I have to be compliant” perspective. It is more from a, “I care about shipping my wine to anybody that wants to buy it and doing so legally and therefore I pay attention to the changes in laws in order to maximize my business.”
I would hazard a guess that from 2005 to now, post-Granholm, winery owners attention to and interest in compliance, outside of topical headline reading, has precipitously declined. Simply, it is a lot of information … but somebody at each winery needs to be accountable for, and chartered with maximizing a winery’s direct shipping capability to EVERY STATE where it is possible if not for actual business, for business development; for industry window-dressing.
Many good and valid points are made on a continual basis across the spectrum of vested parties in the direct wine shipping issue, however one issue that never comes up and should is the fact that not enough wineries actually put their money where their mouth is and get the $100 permit in the newly opened state in order to sell wine to maximum capacity everywhere that they can.
How can other people take the issue of winery direct shipping seriously, if wineries are asleep at the wheel?
By some estimates, about 5% of the available wine in the U.S. market is available on a shelf in Indiana. You would think that wineries would have jumped on the capability to ship to Indiana consumers when given the capability late last year. Not so much. Go ahead, I dare you--audit any random dozen winery ecommerce sites. Ship to Indiana? Nope.
So, this is the conundrum: the capability to legally direct ship to consumers is fine, but wineries have to give a damn and get the permits, too.
And, I am not seeing enough of the “giving a damn” part.
digg this | toast this! | add to del.icio.us | add to newsvine | add to furl | add to reddit |
Posted in, Good Grape Daily: Pomace & Lees. Permalink | Comments (3) | Print | Email This
Enter your email address for a monthly summary of posts, additional news and information available only to email subscribers. Your email is never rented, nor sold to anybody else!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Design by The Blog Studio
