Direct Shipping Update
Tuesday, July 19, 2005

This is from a wine blog that I read, the guy who writes this is right on and has been reporting on the Michigan situation for months now. I am still waiting for a response from Betty Mercer, looking thru his article, it seems like he was able to call her out on her lies. I know that I will not hear from her, but still sending emails makes me feel like I am doing something. The technology for direct shipping and verification is here, so it all goes back to profits and the complete control of wine on behalf of the distributors.


http://www.fermentations.typepad.com/

Technology Combats Wine Wholesaler Hypocrisy

I'm not convinced that facts and reason drive the debates that ensue when a state begins to reconsider their wine shipping laws. Both California and Michigan have taken up the issue of direct shipping in the wake of the May Supreme Court decision that found discriminatory wine laws unconstitutional. In both cases, lobbying and the power of wholesaler money has resulted in taking facts and reason off the table. In California, wholesalers successfully prevented most other states' retailers from shipping to California. In Michigan, that State's wholesalers have purchased the introduction of a bill to ban all shipping.

Nevertheless, those who would propose liberalizing wine shipping laws are obligated to address arguments against direct shipping of wine. Today, there is really only one argument against direct shipping that needs to be addressed: The bogus claim that direct shipping threatens youth who, it is said, are likely to use the Internet to access alcohol.

Most recently Betty Mercer, Executive Director of the alcohol wholesaler funded front "Coalition for Safe and Responsible Michigan" testified that 10% of America's youth obtain alcohol via the Internet. She made this claim in front of the Committee of Regulatory Reform as she testified in favor of a wholesaler-purchased bill that that would ban all direct shipping in Michigan. What makes her claim really ugly is not so much that is completely false, but rather that she KNOWS it is false. I know this because I spoke with her on the phone and explained that this claim is a complete misinterpretation of a study that was conducted over a decade ago and I pointed her to the documents that confirm this.

This episode in hypocrisy is par for the course, but it also points to the urgency of combating this notion that direct shipping of wine will endanger America's youth.

This is why a national wine organizations embrace of technology that makes it simple to identify exactly who is ordering wine is important to the debate over Direct Shipping.

WineAmerica is a national organization representing over 800 wineries in nearly every state in America. They recently partnered with IDology to offer its members access to IDology's IDlive system of verifying the age and identity of those ordering through the telephone or over the Internet. The IDlive system strikes at the heart of the argument that alcohol sales can't really be monitored, the claim that comes up in ever debate on direct shipping.

The irony of wholesalers arguing that minors are endangered by direct shipping is huge when you consider that alcohol wholesalers are intimately connected to the sale of nearly every bottle of alcohol that teens drink since nearly ever drink that goes down the throat of minors and in some cases results in deaths through auto accidents at one point or another goes through the hands of wholesalers.

IDlive will give proponents of on-line wine sales and direct shipping of wine a real world technology that can be held up against the claim that Internet wines sales will entice minors to buy wine via remotely.

Whether politicians will embrace the meaning of this great new technology is unknown. However, it's a key tool in combating the hypocrisy of the likes of Betty Mercer and the wholesalers who pay her and those other around the country who aren't worried about minors, but rather about coffers.

Posted by mardenhill 7/19/2005 08:40:00 AM    

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