Take one of the various wonderful Napa Valley wine tours or Sonoma Valley wine tours which include some of the roughly five hundred wineries in the northern California wine country, enjoy the offerings to be found in their tastings rooms and then select some of your favorite bottles to ship home. Then go home and sell your house and move somewhere other than the eighteen states where it is still illegal to ship wine across state borders so that you’re not charged with a crime. In fact, if you live in one of six states, you will be trying to avoid being charged with a felony. So in those eighteen states, especially within the six, you are best served by leaving the fruits of your discovery from those wonderful wine country tours behind when you head back to San Francisco to fly home. Only thirteen states currently have reciprocal privileges where you are permitted to ship wine between them. The remaining states have legal restrictions that are particular to each.
This fiasco is a leftover byproduct of the prohibition era after which each state gained control over its own liquor laws and while the internet and the ease of purchasing has begun to expose the state-by-state inequities and absurdities of the antiquated laws and the push for change is ongoing, the laws are mostly as they were in the early twentieth century. So if you’re looking forward making your own personal discovery while in wine country having the time of your life on a wine country tour and shipping cases home for the benefit of you and your friends, you may be in for some sobering news. Check the status of your state below:
Felony charges apply states: Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Illegal to ship states: Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia.
Restricted states where individual laws should be considered: Alabama, Alaska, Connecticut, Dist. Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota (recent!), Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and Wyoming. Check carefully before shipping in these states.
Reciprocal states where you can ship without concerns: California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
