Looks like Amazon has given up on ever trying to sell wine to all Americans. Says Wine Spectator: “after exploring the hurdles with the long-established regulatory barriers against shipping alcoholic beverages within the United States, Amazon decided that its time and money were best spent on other projects.” Other projects like not fighting regulatory lawsuits. This doesn’t surprise me at all, though it does suck. The 3-tier, 50-state system put in place after Prohibition benefits no one except state coffers and distributors. And you could say that benefiting state coffers benefits us all — except it’s such an opaque and baroque system it leads to lots of consumers not getting access to wines they’d like and paying too much to boot. It’s not fair — and it’s forever! I’d like to end this on an up note, but can’t think of what it would be. Oh wait, I remembered. On the up-side, kittens are still snuggly!

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Had a great talk with Bill Ward from the Star Tribune about the book yesterday, he was asking me if I learned anything new writing the book. Well, tons, but the most revelatory didn’t even make it into the book. Because it’s so freaking dull, but like some dull things, super important.

This dull, important thing was a paper by George Akerlof called “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism”, it was published in Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1970 and founded a concept called Asymmetric Markets. It was so important it won Akerlof the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001. However, it was written about used-cars, not wine, and I’d argue after all those Lemon Laws were passed allowing people to return used cars it now actually applies more to wine than to used cars.
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Thinking about wine-rip offs, prompted by a comment on Facebook where a friend posted two examples of reasons to stress-out when ordering wine. Bill wrote of the first stressfest “A restaurant trying to pass off Casillero de Diablo as worth $34/bottle when I can buy it for $5 (one of the only wines I know anything about since it used to be my house wine). I have no problem with 2X or 3X markups, but 4, 5, or 7 seems excessive and leads me not to trust anything else on the wine list.” And of his second: “A Sommellier at a super fancy DC restaurant ’suggesting’ a $150 bottle when I’d chosen a $50 one. That one felt like a gross attempt at using shame as a tool…didn’t work since I was with my wife, not someone I was trying to impress by buying a bottle of wine.”
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