Thursday, August 9, 2007

Illini Lose Right To Buy Wine From Out Of State Retailers

Tuesday the Illinois Senate voted 49-5 to pass HB-429, effectively stripping you and me of the right to buy wine from retailers across state lines. Tom Wark over at Fermentation has the scoop.

Of course, wine retailers across the country, who had been invited into Illinois for 15 years to cultivate a market of wine lovers, have been told they are no longer welcome to do business with those or any other Illinois wine lovers.


It is disappointing. This directly impacts an Illinois Consumer's ability to find wine at good prices. Sites like wine.com, Snooth, wine woot, winestilsoldout, and wine searcher are pretty much off limits to you and me (See edit below). This is really sad, because a renaissance in wine sales is about to take place on the internet with innovators like WineQ and Snooth leading the way, and we are left out in the cold.

I join Tom in saying to the Illinois Legislature "Shame on You". This was a blatant disregard for the rights and interests of your constituents and a total sell out to lobbyists and corporate interests. I haven't dug deep enough to find out if my senator voted for it (though I wrote multiple times urging against it), but if I find out that was the case, my vote will go somewhere else next time.

I'm still holding out for a challenge of the bill in the courts, hopefully it will be found unconstitutional. Until then, I guess we are out of luck.

Edit: Snooth founder Philip James commented that Snooth has recently added some in state retailers, including Sams Wine, and that they can now ship to Illinois consumers. He also points out that wine.com has a presence in Illinois and should be able to ship to us. Yay! Unfortuantely there are hundreds of retailers who no longer have this luxury.



1 comment:

Philip said...

Its true that we cant help with out of state shippers, but Sam's is up and running on Snooth. A few other Illinois retailers have signed up and are in the queue.

There's also the larger companies like Wine.com and Wine Messenger that have an Illinios presence who can still ship to you.