Wines Are No Longer Free to Travel Across State Lines | Hacker News Reader

Wines Are No Longer Free to Travel Across State Lines

nytimes.com

173 pointslxm113 comments

The title is a little (not a lot) misleading:

  Wines Are No Longer Free to Travel Across State Lines

Later in the article, it points out that There’s no jurisdiction for retailers at the federal level. No law was enacted at midnight last night. Instead, 14 states including CA + DC allow importation across state lines. Moreover, the laws in the other states only apply to retailers and not to vineyards (Granholm v. Heald). The change seems to have been that UPS and FedEx are now enforcing this in the other 36 states. Maybe this is a better title:

  In Some States, Wines Can't Be Bought From Out Of State Retailers

From here[0], the 14 states that are allowed (plus CA and DC):

Alaska, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Virginia, Washington, D.C., West Virginia, and Wyoming

[0]: http://people.com/food/wine-shipping-laws-crackdown/

Also listed in the posted article (at the bottom).

As a resident of Seattle, it took be a minute to register that "Washington" in that list is part of DC.

Style note: when crafting lists whose members include commas, a semicolon is the preferred delimiter. For example, we could amend the above to "... Virginia; Washington, D.C.; West Virginia..."

In this case, I’d prefer “D.C.” or “the District of Columbia”, to avoid both the ambiguity of the original and the awkwardness of using semicolons.

It's also (imho) more stylistically correct to not mention Washington.

The District of Columbia was originally called 'The Territory of Columbia' as a Federal District, and the 'City of Washington' as a name for the Federal City. So technically there was both a city and district designation, and the city designation still exists as it was redefined in the 1871 Organic Act.

I think the reason people say "Washington, D.C." when referring to it in a list of states is that it sounds less weird than the unabbreviated "District of Columbia".

Or just don't put in a comma.

That would be incorrect grammar, like saying "St. Louis Missouri" instead of "St. Louis, Missouri".

Would there be a strong argument for simply saying Columbia?

After all, context will mostly clear up which one you mean, and we tend to not say "State of Wisconsin" very often.

You would confuse a big chunk of the East Coast, where "Columbia" means a city in Maryland southwest of Baltimore. If you're looking for something totally unambiguous, you can say just "DC". If you're the New York Times and likewise, you could say "the District of Columbia", but apparently their style guide prefers otherwise.

>Would there be a strong argument for simply saying Columbia?

Yes, that it would confuse most of your readers since DC is never referred to in that way, ever.

I don't understand. How is this not a straightforward violation of the Interstate Commerce Clause?

The 21st Amendment (which repealed prohibition) explicitly grants states the right to regulate alcohol imports and possession.

Even if that weren't the case, it says:

    [The Congress shall have Power] To
    regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,
    and among the several States, and with
    the Indian Tribes;

I.e. not that the Federal government must regulate interstate commerce, merely that it has the power to do that, and even if it said that the commerce must be regulated it could still be regulated to the effect that you couldn't e.g. sell across state lines.

But yes, the reason the regulation is different for alcohol than for other goods is ostensibly the 21st.

But also see "dormant commerce clause."

I spy a law student. The DCC is the stuff of conlaw nightmares.

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. It’s not that the feds must somehow regulate interstate commerce, it’s that the states can’t. The 21st carves out an exception.

I'm pointing out that the states forbidding commerce across state lines is not a violation of the commerce clause per-se. Rather it's a violation of how the federal government has chosen to use the rights it's granted by the commerce clause.

I.e. it's just the academic point that it's not inevitable that the Federal government uses the power of the CC to enforce free trade between states, that's just how it's chosen to implement it.

I.e. there could be an alternate timeline of the US where the CC enforces the ability of individual states to impose interstate tariffs up to some threshold, similar to how the EU manages agriculture quotas within the single market.

Meaning that, pre-21st, the states could have regulated this if there was a federal law saying they could? Or perhaps merely if there was no federal law saying they couldn't?

I may be wrong about this, but my understanding of the CC is that if say Nevada were to enact a law saying that sales to California were subject to tariff they wouldn't be found to be in violation of the CC. Instead they'd be found in violation of some federal code that the government could enact because of the CC.

I.e. the CC isn't some clause saying that free trade between states must be respected at all cost (sans the 21nd). Otherwise why would there be a federal drug law on the basis of the CC? That's a prohibition of the sale of certain goods on the back of prohibiting sales across state lines on the back of the CC.

Hence the indirect reply to SeanLuke upthread. This is not a violation of the CC, but of some federal statute enacted on the basis of the CC.

The distinction matters because if the CC isn't an amendment that ensures free trade the federal government could just as well use it to ensure trade restrictions between states as free trade, which it mostly does today.

When interpreting a text, and it appears that two statements appear to be in conflict, the more specific statement is to be followed.

The interstate commerce clause gives Congress the power to regulate (make normal) commerce between the states, removing the power of states to impose tarrifs or other barriers to trade. This was a big problem at the time. The 21st amendment specifically makes an exception to this general clause in the case of intoxicating spirits.

In the case of Amendments, it isn't the more specific but rather the more recent. So the 21st carves out an exception in the Commerce Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3.

Otherwise, yeah, the Articles of Confederation weren't working.

This was the crux of state regulators' arguments in Granholm v. Heald, and it failed there.

From Wikipedia: "The context of the 21st Amendment, they wrote, was to return to the status quo that existed before Prohibition, making it clear that the states had the power to regulate alcohol however they wished, including banning alcoholic beverages entirely within the state if desired. Before Prohibition, the states did not have the power to violate the Dormant Commerce Clause, and the 21st Amendment was not intended to grant them this power."

You can’t “violate” the interstate commerce clause; it grants powers, doesn’t limit them.

(It, along with “necessary and proper”, have been used to justify just about every activity the federal government has done.)

So many people get this backwards, although I think some of this is the Constitution's fault. Originally it was a list of rights the government had, with the understanding that the states retained the rest. Then the bill of rights added a few civil liberties, i.e. rights the government specifically did not have. Theoretically this shouldn't make a difference, because anything not listed in the constitution was already unconstituional. Of course in practice we've read between the lines a lot with the original constituion, so it makes some sense that we also set some hard limits to what we can't do. But still, it makes it really confusing and leads to a lot of "interesting" legal beliefs by people who aren't familiar.

>Then the bill of rights added a few civil liberties, i.e. rights the government specifically did not have. Theoretically this shouldn't make a difference, because anything not listed in the constitution was already unconstituional.

I don't think this is true even for the strictest originalist interpretation possible. Without the Bill of Rights, Congress and the President would have much more expansive power in their creation and especially enforcement of law.

The Constitution does not establish a process for the federal government to investigate, detain, try, and punish people for violating its laws, though it is clear that it must have those powers. The major function of the Bill of Rights is to draw lines around those powers, lines that perhaps existed in the common law, but that could have been altered by Act of Congress in the absence of a constitutional provision.

There are also parts of the Bill of Rights which do constraint Congress's enumerated powers. For example, even under a strict originalist interpretation, the Commerce Clause would allow Congress to take actions that abridge the freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. It could prohibit the publishing of certain newspapers across state lines, for instance. The First Amendment prevents that kind of thing.

If I recall correctly, Madison’s original position was that the content of the Bill of Rights (and more besides) was already implied by the Constitution, and that the document was superfluous and possibly harmful if it led to people considering rights not explicitly mentioned to not also be part of the Constitution. He changed his mind, however, as a pragmatic gesture toward unity and compromise with the Anti-Federalists.

He was very wrong. The sedition acts made it pretty clear that without explicit protection, the government can and will abuse its powers.

The position that he and Hamilton took was somewhat incoherent in my opinion, since the Constitution did list rights, like the prohibition on ex post facto laws and bills of attainder, and the guarantee of habeas corpus except in times of insurrection.

Hamilton made an interesting argument in Federalist 84, that rights like freedom of the press and of speech are too vague to belong in a legal document, since their interpretation would necessarily be determined solely by political winds. Compare to the more concrete prohibition of ex post facto laws, for example. Nevertheless, the majority of the Bill of Rights turned out to be more like those concrete provisions. The First and Second Amendments are the most notable exceptions, and his predictions have partially panned out. Thankfully, it's been for the better anyway: freedom of speech as we know it would not exist without the First Amendment.

>For example, even under a strict originalist interpretation, the Commerce Clause would allow Congress to take actions that abridge the freedom of speech, religion, and assembly.

>The Constitution does not establish a process for the federal government to investigate, detain, try, and punish people for violating its laws, though it is clear that it must have those powers.

These are great examples, and I think they cut straight to the heart of the issue. Would the ideal solution be to rewrite the Constitution as a truthful, detailed, and exhaustive list of the powers the government does have, or would it be best to list only restrictions to the government's power? Or is a mix necessary, despite the inherent contradictions?

People seem to forget this all the time, even though it's obvious. The Constitution is an atrociously written document, by modern standards of technical writing. The 18th Century predates the modern notion of technically precise writing. Look at Newton's writings, for example.

Your interpretation is the reasonable one, but the people who matter (a majority of the Supreme Court), don't agree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause

Justice Thomas and the late Justice Scalia, and others before them, shared your view.

...and fungibility, and states-secrets.

States can violate it. It's called the dormant commerce clause.

How can anyone not understand something without which an iconic, key piece of American culture would have had no basis?

I'm thinking of Smokey and The Bandit, of course.

Thanks to them having been born in a future that doesn't even know what Smokey and the Bandit is, and where Pedro Pascal is their Burt Reynolds.

Alcohol has existed outside the Commerce Clause since Prohibition, as outlawing its sale was done via Constitutional amendment, rather than legislation. Same with repeal. Amendments supersede reserved Congressional authority. The result of this is that regulations on the sale and distribution of alcohol operate entirely differently than any other American industry (and is particularly vulnerable to regulatory capture). For example, try buying a Texas beer (in a store or bar) outside of Texas not called Shiner or Lone Star. It's very difficult, as Texas laws make it difficult to impossible for craft brewers to export across state lines. The biggest fans of those laws? Shiner and Lone Star.

So the vineyard can truck its goods across state lines? seems bonkers to me

Only if a state allows for direct shipments from in-state wineries. The effect of Granholm was to forbid states from using the 21st Amendment to discriminate against out-of-state producers.

Does this mean I can't buy sake through the mail now if i'm in one of those stupid 36 states?

Yes.

There's a mead producer I'm fond out in North Carolina and I haven't been able to get their bottles shipped to NY for some time. To get around that, I'd been shipping them to my mom's in South Carolina and we've been making exchanges whenever one of us visits the other.

That's not an option anymore and my only route will now have to be a 2 hour drive from her house whenever I visit there (since she's not going to be making that drive...).

It's not like there's great distribution of mead here, even though this is NYC. Consumers lose this round, I guess.

What I can do at least is form a relationship with a local store/distributor and have them place a prepaid, minimum case (likely minimum 6 case) order at a time, with whatever huge markup they decide to add for doing nothing more than being legally able to place the order.

I have an interesting NC/SC story - There's a discount wine/liquor store right across the state line from the Carowinds amusement park (in Charlotte). People from North Carolina were driving down and loading up (which is different from "getting loaded"...) their cars to save some money.

The NC Alcoholic Beverage Control Board took exception to this (loss of tax revenue, possible blue-law violations, etc.) and sent one of their officers down there. He sat in the parking lot and would radio the license plates of cars with North Carolina tags that he observed buying large quantities of booze on to a team of agents waiting on I-77. Who would then pull the buyers over and charge them with bootlegging.

The South Carolina Highway Patrol got wind of this and sent several officers to the parking lot to explain to the North Carolina revenuer the concept of jurisdiction, and how he was out of his.

The fact that interstate bootlegging is something that even exists blows my mind. Feels like the states are all part of the same system until you hit stuff like archaic blue laws, marijuana laws, abortion laws, auto insurance, and (recently) gay marriage.

Those are all important things, and it's pretty frustrating not to have the same rights in some states as I do in others. I'm surprised (but glad) there aren't state border crossing stops yet.

This is small stuff like getting wine and fireworks across state lines, I can't begin to imagine how someone who needs an abortion must feel about it.

> there aren't state border crossing stops yet

Actually, funny story, when I was driving from Seattle to California a few years back, we got stopped around the Oregon-California border for a checkpoint. They ask questions to make sure you aren't importing fruits or plant matter that might be carrying pests non-native to the area (think "emerald ash borer" if you aren't sure what they're looking for).

Anyways, I didn't realize what was happening for a moment, and thought it was a toll road. It was a very awkward moment when I tried to hand the guy some cash as he walked up to my window.

Awesome story...and I think I know the exact discount liquor store you're talking about, too...

So I just had a quick run to my favorite sake site, it looks like I can still order sake (I ordered a Junmai Ginjo). Interestingly North Dakota (random state that can ship wine) can't get sake shipped.

I wonder if sake qualifies as something else like beer. Its brewed the same way basically, so perhaps the laws are restricted to grape wines only?

My mead distributor hasn't updated their site to reflect the new enforcement either. I wouldn't chance it as they may run into problems once it's time to ship.

Or I'd stock up a ton now. As for me, I think I'm about to start producing my own mead anyway.

It sucks because getting good sake in the midwest is... hard at best.

Every place that has sake has no friggin clue how to even know if something is good. Stocking up like crazy will only work so long, and making sake isn't exactly something I'd try, even given how close it is to regular beer fermentation.

I ordered a single small bottle, so even if it gets held up its not as big of a deal, I hope. Time to go call my legislature and tell them to fix the bill or I vote for the other team again out of spite.

Another of the many businesses that attempt to bypass competition with absurd regulatory capture.

Taxis, auto dealers, and many others

In Seattle we have a train that goes from the airport to downtown Seattle. It's perfect and ideal to get to and from the airport. BUT! It stops at about half a mile away from the the actually airport lobby as to not disrupt the taxi business. I simply can't believe it.

It's a bit of a walk; the real amazement to me was that the rental car terminal was built across the street from the Tukwila Int'l Blvd station - I assume some union or lobbyist there for the bus driver's union forced that one.

Karma is fun, though. It's fun walking past the cab and town car aisles in the garage now (entirely empty, zero customers) and instead heading to the millennial cab stand to wait for an Uber/Lyft.

The whole setup really bothers me. They are clearly trying to make it unnecessarily annoying to take an Uber. You should be able to get picked up at the same place that friends/family would pick you up, right at the exit to the terminal. Instead, you have to walk to a random spot in the middle of the parking garage, where 50 other people are also trying to get picked up at the same time, and there's a long line of Ubers crawling through one lane trying to find their passenger.

Instead of asking why an Uber can't pick someone up at the friends/family pickup lane, why not ask this question:

Why shouldn't a taxi be allowed to pick people up at the same place that friends/family would?

An Uber is, for all intents and purposes, a cab - not a friend.

I assure you, the SeaTac taxi lane existed long before Uber. This isn't some petty anti-Uber ruling.

The SeaTac taxi lane is a different kind of thing altogether, since you just walk up and take the next taxi. It is much more convenient, and is much more logically justified, than the Uber zone, since Uber matches you to a specific driver.

Aside from the fact that the cab lane creates convenience, while the Uber area destroys it, there’s other reasons that apply to cabs and not Ubers. Cabs would just be slowly crawling through the arrivals area, hoping to get a client, and causing traffic. Ubers, in contrast, are there to find a specific passenger, just like family/friends, and have no incentive to slowly crawl through arrivals.

> and is much more logically justified, than the Uber zone, since Uber matches you to a specific driver.

That sounds like Uber's problem. If they just got medallions, they too could queue up for curb-side pickup.

> Ubers, in contrast, are there to find a specific passenger, just like family/friends, and have no incentive to slowly crawl through arrivals.

Yes, they would absolutely be causing traffic. At most times of day, the arrivals lane is already at close to capacity. Throwing in a bunch of commercial traffic would be awful for the rest of us.

family/friends are also causing traffic. Why do they deserve priority access?

Ubers without an assigned client would probably crawl through waiting to get assigned. Inevitably, they would be assigned just as they committed to leaving the area, and have to pull around.

> An Uber is, for all intents and purposes, a cab - not a friend.

A private driver?

A cabbie is also a private driver for my 15 minute ride.

It's a quarter-mile, but yeah it's awful.

Sounds pretty unbelievable, maybe because it's not true?

The line I remember is that the airport light rail station isn't connected directly to the terminal because of budgetary constraints and uncertainty in airport expansion plans, as well as security concerns: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=200...

9/11 happened during the planning process and changed all sorts of assumptions.

It's a minor nit, unrelated to the article's main point, but I found it strange that the author seems to think you need a high-speed internet connection to order wine across state lines. I'm guessing this comes from ISP marketing which portrays broadband as an absolute essential for all internet activities.

Depends on your definition of "high-speed." I still think of that as meaning anything faster than dialup. The front page of wine.com is 4MB, which would take ten minutes to load over a 56k modem, so in that sense it doesn't seem wrong.

Of course the meaning of high-speed is always going to be relative. The author makes it sound like ordering wine over the internet wasn't possible until broadband become available. I don't know if such sites existed, but a wine retailer certainly could have setup a storefront on the internet back in 1995.

Yes, wine.com was one of the the early ecommerce sites. Started in 1995, but may not have been transacting until a few years later.

Or even earlier. Catalog sales and mail order have been around for a long time. 1-800 numbers for orders by phone started in the 60s and became standard in the 80s. The internet didn't invent remote ordering.

Do any still exist? They weren’t implying you always needed a high speed connection.

That's yet another whole potential article about lobbying and regulation in America, labeling what "high-speed Internet" is until it's watered down to DSL or so at 4 mbps. At least a few years ago they redefined it to 25 mbps.

They're only wasteful because it doesn't matter. Wine.com would not take long to load over a median connection, even if the median connection was 56k or worse. It's a far cry from uses that inherently require high speeds.

If by "not long" you mean 10 minutes under ideal conditions?

If the median connection was 56k, I guarantee you wine.com would not take 10 minutes to load over 56k. It would be closer to 10 seconds.

Wine.com does not need broadband to be widespread. Widespread broadband lets it be a little bit prettier, and the devs are too lazy to care about exceptionally slow connections. Without widespread broadband, wine.com would be the same, but with smaller pictures. Without widespread broadband, twitch would not exist, and youtube would be crippled. Those are the sites it enables.

Images are optional downloads, it could be a 400MB image and it would take the same 0.00 seconds on a 14.4 modem. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/981640

Also, blind people still use the web. So, that feature is not going away any time soon.

Idea for startup: web site that provides a unified storefront for vineyards, but doesn’t actually touch the transaction or shipping.

Maybe the wineries pay the site a percentage of referred sales at the end of the month.

Once you’ve made your first billion on this, please gift me a few choice subscriptions. :-)

If anyone in the New York area is interested in collaborating on this, as a political project for 2018, let me know.

Interested. Not sure the extent you're willing to go other than "political project" but I've got some other wine industry connections that may be interested in this as well.

I have a Type 85 license in CA. Shoot me an email if I can help.

I like this! Another idea--I'd love a site that lets me buy/sort/search wine by importer. To this day, I've not found a better way to find good wines than by picking a bottle I enjoy, and buying other wines from that same importer. For instance, if an online store let me select Louis/Dressner (importer I love), and offered me free shipping on a full case of their wines, I would use it in a heartbeat.

Not a single wine shop offers this sorting ability! So what I saying is: don't be a unified storefront for vineyards, be a storefront for importers. Logistics would be easier, too.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/minibar-delivery-en...

This is literally Winestyr’s business model. Of course there are loopholes in the law that also allow them to still handle shipping.

Online retailers can also be licensed in multiple states. Many of the big names are.

I believe there are sites that already do this. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I live in CA and often send wine to friends and relatives in MI via wine.com. I often can't send it directly from my local wine store because of all the odd laws. But somehow it works fine via wine.com. Go figure.

I work for an importer that provides them their wine and am semi-familiar with their distribution setup. Many online retails tackle the issue in different ways but wine.com has setup "stores" in a number of states which they ship the wine to and then those "stores" then ship to the customers. So on paper the customer is buying within the state basically even though all they did was buy online.. Also one thing to note is wineries can ship to more states than retailers can, so wine.com setup a winery licences in texas specifically so they can ship to more states under that licence.

Other online retailers (Californian) put in their shipping terms that the customer agrees to be buying the wine in califonia (even though they're shipping out of state).

So wine.com?

The only way around this that I can think of is if you live in a state that has the wines locally, and a friend or family member wants one, you may be able to ship it to them. Personally, when it is holiday time, I have shipped wine to myself at my parent's address, so that I wouldn't have to pack it for a flight.

Is it legal? My guess it is, but only because you aren't selling it to someone. I am not a lawyer, and of course I am not your lawyer!

In doing so, I came up with some important guidelines for myself:

• ULINE has very good wine shippers, made of styrofoam (https://www.uline.com/BL_5450/Wine-Shippers) and pulp (https://www.uline.com/BL_5451/Pulp-Wine-Shippers). This was a helpful coincidence in that I already like to consume Black Blood of the Earth (from http://www.funraniumlabs.com), and Phil uses those shippers.

• Be safe, and use the shipping option that requires 21 or older delivery. Even if you're shipping it to yourself. This has the helpful side-effect of ensuring that someone is there to receive it, so it won't get left alone.

• Use 2-day shipping or better! That helps ensure that your box never sits on a truck for too long, and especially not overnight. This is very important when shipping something that is almost entirely water, during a time when much of the country is experiencing freezing weather. Or, conversely, you don't want it being exposed to too-high temperatures.

> you may be able to ship it to them

This seems like a good idea but forget about it. I tried to ship wine last year as a gift for my in-laws... I couldn't find a single carrier who would touch that shipment. They all basically told me that they wouldn't deliver alcohol for individuals, and this distinction was important since I was already having wine delivered to my house by several of them (directly from wineries).

Which courier did you use to ship it to yourself at your parents?

This sucks. Wine subscriptions are big money-makers for vineyards. And, it will mostly hurt California.

The article points out that (apparently?) wineries are exempt -- this is about retailers:

...the Supreme Court ruling in Granholm v. Heald effectively lifted many state bans on buying directly from out-of-state wineries.

Though the ruling applied to wineries, not to retailers, Granholm had a liberating effect on consumers who suddenly found it much easier to find the wines they wanted online. The decision also allows the direct shipment of wines purchased by tourists at wineries to all states.

I imagine the path of alcohol and wine will give us a road map for future regulatory of marijuana. Let's say for talking purposes that it's no longer a schedule 1, what kind of regulatory capture and manipulation will be required to keep cheaper states from exporting to those with more expensive tax dollars?

> I imagine the path of alcohol and wine will give us a road map for future regulatory of marijuana

I don't think this is a safe assumption. Prohibition intersected with the Great Depression and the Constitution. The latter is key; Section 2 of the 21st Amendment expressly gives states the right to regulate the "transportation or importation" of "intoxicating liquors". Marijuana has no such Commerce Clause [2] override.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-first_Amendment_to_the_... § 2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

For anyone not wanting to read the article, here's the list of states where UPS and FedEx will still ship wines to:

Alaska; California; Idaho; Louisiana; Missouri; Nebraska; Nevada; New Hampshire; New Mexico; North Dakota; Oregon; Virginia; Washington, D.C.; West Virginia; Wyoming

Wonder if wine-exporting states like California could use their 21st amendment powers to impose retaliatory tariffs on booze from states that are doing this.

No, this is the point of the Granholm case mentioned in the article: States can’t apply restrictions on imports they don’t apply to in-state products.

Granholm v. Heald was about rules which targeted direct sales from wineries, and held that states couldn't have different rules for in-state wineries and out-of-state wineries. I'm saying California could impose rules on, say, larger breweries, which don't really exist in California.

Huh? Even discounting now-massive craft brewers like Sierra Nevada and Lagunitas, Anheuser-Busch has at least one huge brewing facility in CA:

http://www.anheuser-busch.com/about/breweries-and-tours/fair...

Besides, the courts would see right through laws that just-so-happened to affect only producers bigger than those in CA. What would be the rational basis other than to evade Granholm?

What would be the rational basis of distributor based laws?

I hope they do. This is why the commerce clause exists, it's about time someone gets around to showing that the 21st amendment's override is bogus.

Why is wine interesting?

I assume the interest here is the ~$60B market for selling wine in the US used to be open for shifting to e-commerce.

Now it's more difficult with 36 states banning shipments to individual buyers that cross their borders.

Because it's one of the few products that can be legal to purchase in retail stores by both the shipper and receiver, yet illegal to ship.

Joining some tobacco products as the only examples I know of, other than obvious safety-related items (live animals, aerosols, etc.)

Why have most of your comments over the past couple of months been downvoted to oblivion?

That account has been shadow banned, I suspect. And only comments not vouched for are unhidden.

It doesn't look like it. If the account were shadowbanned the comments would be tagged "[dead]". It looks like they're often low-effort or unsubstantial comments of the type that would be downvoted anyway.

OK, maybe so. The recent run of grayed out comments seemed suspicious. But yes, it's only been a couple months since that started.

Edit: That's some good stuff in your profile :)

Thanks :) I have it in there as much for me as for anyone else. I find myself referring to it every couple of weeks or so, just as a refresher.

In Europe, wine and beer and cider are not alcoholic beverages. They're foods. You can also safely ship wine from Spain to Germany and beer from Germany to Spain.

In the US you need to be 21 to drink beer or vote, yet 18 is fine to join the army, meet new and interesting people and kill them.

18 is the voting age in the US.

Ok wine, beer and cider certainly are treated specially in parts of Europe. In Denmark for example you must be 16 to purchase low-ABV alcohol and over 18 to purchase anything higher (4% if I remember correctly). As far as I know no such restrictions apply to other food, such as coca cola.

You can also safely ship liquor in the U.S. I like to ship back liquors from distilleries, but want to avoid airline baggage fees so I ship them via a shipping service. The booze has always come through fine.

Also in the U.S. you can vote at 18 (in some cases you can even vote at 17, as long as you'll be 18 by the first Tuesday of November of that year).

In Denmark, 16 and 17 year olds can buy alcohol with a strength up to 16.5%.

In Europe, wine, beer and cider are alcoholic beverages subject to special regulations and taxes. They are absolutely not considered as regular food. It’s true, however, that the regulations and taxes are usually lighter than for “hard” alcoholic beverages.

You are mistaken on all points. All EU states have a legal drinking age, and it is usually 18 or 16.

Almost all countries, including Germany, also impose an excise duty (harm tax) on beverages like beer, but the amount of tax varies considerably by member state.

It might be possible to order beer from some EU countries to others, but for example certain Nordic countries still maintain a state alcohol monopoly which practically makes it illegal for private consumers to buy alcohol online even from another EU country (more precisely, it makes the bureaucracy for selling alcohol so complex for the foreign retailer, that they just refuse delivery to these countries ..)

The German one for beer is nugatory th uk beer duty is 14 times the German one

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