The other day a visiting friend asked me if there was anything I liked about Florida. I managed to come up with three: no state income tax, warm ocean water (good for diving, unlike California), and thunderstorms. One of the other complaints that I’ve had about the state is that when we moved here from LA, we could no longer receive wines from the Wine of the Month club, something that we’d been doing for years there.

The Supreme Court has apparently ruled that state laws prohibiting the sale of wine to individuals by out-of-state entities (e.g., the Florida one that prevents the WotM Club from sending us wine in Boca Raton) are unconstitutional. However, Professor Bainbridge says that:

…it’s not at all certain that consumers in the 24 states that had banned direct to consumer sales will soon be able to buy wine on the internet and have it shipped to their home or office. If the states chose to change their laws so as to ban direct-to-consumer sales by both out-of-state and in-state wineries, those laws almost certainly would be upheld as within the states’ powers under the 21st Amendment. Given the considerable power wielded in most of those 24 by the wholesalers and retailers who benefit from bans on direct-to-consumer shipments, as well as lingering Prohibitionist sentiment in some of the more Southern and rural of them, I expect many of the 24 to enact nondiscriminatory bans on direct-to-consumer shipments.

Well, if that’s the case, the state (and its wineries) are in a quandary. There are in fact Florida wineries (something I hadn’t known prior to researching this blog post). At least one of them (I didn’t check any others–it constituted an existence proof) is shipping wine directly to Florida consumers (in fact it probably even does so out of state, though I didn’t attempt the order to find out).

That means that, if the good professor is correct, in order to circumvent this ruling, Florida will have to outlaw in-state wineries from shipping direct as well, and only allow them to offer their fermented grape juice through the groceries as other wine is sold or (perhaps) they might even have to restrict wine sales to the state liquor stores (this is less clear). So it’s a devil’s bargain for the states (certainly small, relative to, say, California) for them. They can keep out the competition, but only at the cost of losing a perhaps-significant part of their own mail-order market. It will be interesting to see how both the state (and lobbyists in the state wine industry, whatever its political strength) responds.