They’ve been described as Minnesota’s Tupperware parties for wine tasters.
For the past two years, a consultant with the Traveling Vineyard, a Massachusetts company operating in nearly 30 states, would come to your home. Along with friends, you’d sample a pinot or chardonnay, and then fill out a form if you wanted to buy some.
And here’s how the regulators are going to kill it:
On Tuesday, state authorities raided a landmark Minneapolis liquor store, Surdyk’s, seizing about 40 cases of wine in an effort to shut down the Traveling Vineyard. Surdyk’s ships prepackaged and prepaid orders from the company to its customers.
The state alcohol enforcement division says the Traveling Vineyard can’t legally sell wine without a license.
[…]
Texas, Washington and Massachusetts will be taking some form of regulatory action against Geerlings & Wade, which owns the Traveling Vineyard, to change or stop how it does business in those states because it is violating licensing laws, according to a search warrant filed Tuesday.
Minnesota would be the first state to attempt to present a criminal case against the company. Misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor charges are expected to be filed by the Minneapolis city attorney’s office today, Kjelsberg said.
“We aren’t aware of any other business in the state that operates like the Traveling Vineyard,” she said. “They are taking sales away from legitimate retailers.”
[…]
“I hope this will be the end of the company, but that remains to be seen,” she said.
The alcohol industry deserves a heap of scorn for its position on these types of issues. I regularly get industry publications where an article defending “personal responsibility” runs next to an article defending the three-tiered wholesaler system because, the argument goes, alcohol is special and deserves that extra layer of regulation. Consumers can’t be trusted to buy direct from wholesalers, Internet proprietors, or companies like the Traveling Vineyard, alcohol executives say. It’s just too cheap! We’ll drink too much.
In truth, of course, the retailers just like the fact that most states have laws in place that protect them from competing business models. The three-tiered system is a racket that protects antiquated business models from wholesalers like Costco and Sam’s Club, and from innovators like Traveling Vineyard.