Archive for the ‘Wine Legal Battles’ Category
Not long ago I wrote about the corrupt circumstances of “Regulatory Capture”. In that article, Regulatory Capture was described this way: “Regulatory capture is an economic theory that says regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating. The result is that an agency, charged with acting in the public interest, instead acts in ways that benefit incumbent firms in the industry it is supposed to be regulating.” It’s never difficult to…
REGULATORY CAPTURE Anyone working long enough in the alcohol arena will recognize the system this phrase describes, even if they are unfamiliar with the phrase itself “Regulatory capture is an economic theory that says regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating. The result is that an agency, charged with acting in the public interest, instead acts in ways that benefit incumbent firms in the industry it is supposed to be…
What would you tell the federal government about competition in the alcohol industry if you could keep your comments anonymous? This is the question that struck me as I began to look over the nearly 190 comments that have been provided to the TTB in response to the Biden Administration’s announcement it was looking into the subject of “Promoting Competition in the Beer, Wine and Spirits Market.” It began taking public comments in late July. The deadline for sending comments…
Over the past two months, I’ve seen at least four examples of people arguing that banning out-of-state wine retailers from shipping into a state advances a state’s goal of protecting the health and safety of its citizens. The bans on retailer wine shipping do this, it is argued, because it helps keep lower-priced wines out of the states’ markets, which, in turn, lowers consumption of alcohol. This argument leads us to a very important question: What is the difference between…
Wineries’ use of fulfillment houses to store, pack, label boxes and prepare wines for shipment to consumers is illegal. Who knew?? Try to imagine the logistic of wine shipping if producers were required by destination states to store, pack and arrange shipments of wine to consumers from their own bonded facilities, instead of contracting with fulfillment houses. How much more expensive would this make DTC shipping? How much more space would wineries and bonded facilities require to undertake shipments? Sound…
