Say what you will about wine and spirit wholesalers, but you now can’t deny their magical powers to divine guilt and innocence. In fact, with their special and wizardly abilities to determine who is guilty and who is not, it’s downright difficult to understand why we even keep and pay for a functioning judicial system. Just ask the wholesalers if they are guilty. These magical powers of the wine and spirit wholesaler were on display recently in an article in…

I recently had the good fortune of being interviewed by ReasonTV on the subject of laws that harm wine consumers. In the brief interview, I outline many of the ways in which various state laws, supported by various actors in the wine industry, harm consumer choice and consumer access to wines. However, what I did not do is address the most common ways these laws are defended and justified by those that benefit from them. In the interest of thoroughness,…

I’ve been enjoying of late a review of the politics and ideologies of the American Revolutionary period. This period of our history has always been my favorite. But in enjoying a series of lectures, reading an old Bernard Bailyn history and looking over some primary documents, one thing has become clear to me. Today’s consistently discriminatory state laws concerning alcohol, the state laws that put out-of-state entities at a severe commercial disadvantage, amount to a refutation of one of the…

In March, after a multi-year political battle, the Governor of Texas did not sign a law allowing sales of wine in grocery stores. Instead he signed a bill allowing cities and counties to vote on whether to sell wine in grocery stores. In June campaigns in a number of Tennessee cities began to gather signatures to put the question of whether wine should be sold in grocery stores there on the November ballot. Yesterday, after only three months, it was…