Why Buying Wine Online Is a Bust - shipping costs and regulations are prohibitive

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, April, 1999 by Elizabeth Razzi

Shipping is expensive, and many states prohibit direct shipments anyway.

My mind goes numb from wine before I've even touched a drop. Incomprehensible descriptions of tannins and mouth-feel and fruity afternotes leave me dizzy. And there's that headache I get every time I wander the aisles trying to choose a bottle, fully aware that I am being unduly influenced by pretty labels and high price tags, but with little else on which to peg a decision.

Online, however, I can be a much more clearheaded shopper. Some of the best sites seem as if they were designed for me. The selection and prices are good enough to impress the office wine connoisseur, and their tutorials are welcoming to a novice like yours truly. And no one looks at you with disdain if you limit your search to bottles under $15.

On the other hand, wine is not a natural for Internet sales the way, say, books and compact discs are. There are unique obstacles between mouse and merlot. First, a bottle of wine is a heavy thing to ship, which makes single-bottle orders fairly impractical. (I racked up shipping charges as high as $22 on a $35 bottle of wine.) A case of 12 bottles is more economical to ship--about $20--especially because shops typically offer volume discounts of 10% or so.

Second, a bottle of fine wine is vulnerable to temperature extremes during shipping. So think twice before ordering an expensive bottle of wine as summer approaches--it could cook in transit. Similarly, freezing weather could ruin your shipment. Several of the wine shops I ordered from in midwinter held my order until Monday to minimize the chance that the wine might freeze in transit over the weekend. Several suppliers recommend using second-day air shipping to reduce the bottles' exposure to harsh weather. Consequently, deliveries were anything but speedy, taking as long as 13 days.

Third, the information highway to Napa Valley runs straight through a turf war being waged among the wineries, Internet wine shops, local wholesalers and state liquor-control boards. Almost half the states prohibit the direct shipment of alcohol to their residents, and those that do allow it impose widely varying restrictions (see the box on page 128).

I didn't find many bargains online, at least compared with the offerings of one of the better local wine retailers. In one case, the local retailer beat the online price by $5 per bottle; most of the online prices were $1 or $2 less than the local wine shop.

Despite the frustrations and legal wrangling, there's a good, sound argument in favor of shopping for wine online. The best Web sites let you tap the offerings of boutique wineries and snap up vintages produced in lots of 1,000 cases or less. That's Napa Valley heaven for a true wine lover.

GETTING THE GOODS. I hunted for the best bottle I could find between $25 and $35, relying heavily on the Web sites' recommendations, where possible.

I hit a roadblock early when one promising site, K&L Wine Merchants (klwines.com), refused to ship wine into Virginia or Washington, D.C., because of local restrictions. Another site, wineaccess.com, took my order and then referred me to shops in upstate New York and Baltimore, neither of which would ship out of state.

It took persistence, but I did finally manage to place orders for cabernet sauvignon with four online shops. These Web sites winked at the restrictions against shipping to Virginia or D.C.--warning that it is the customer's responsibility to comply with state law and adding that ownership of the alcohol actually transfers in their home state, which usually was California.

Two of the four sites were only so-so, but the other two were definitely worth bookmarking. In the former category is A Winestore on the Internet, awinestore.com. It isn't a bad site, but it's not much fun, either. It offers brief, somewhat jargony descriptions of many, but not all, of its wines. And there's a three-bottle, or $45, minimum. I ordered a 1994 Clos du Val cabernet at $28.99, a 1995 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars cabernet at $35, and a 1995 Laurel Glen Winery cabernet at $35. The Clos du Val '94 was no longer available locally. The Stag's Leap cost about $5 more online than at home, and the Laurel Glen cost the same locally. Second-day air shipping added another $22, for a grand total of $120.99. The wines arrived in good condition six days after ordering.

An upstate New York shop, bedfordwines.com, brought on my wine headache--it posts only a price list with no descriptions. (It also lists the addresses and phone numbers of West Coast wineries.) You can at least order online, so I chose a 1995 Phelps Napa for $29--the same as at the local shop--plus $19 for second-day air. But the site put my order through at the $5 ground-shipping rate. So I had to phone the shop. The wine arrived 13 days later.

One of the best sites I found is Napa-based Calwine.com. It has a good selection of wines, descriptions that aren't too dizzying and lots of chitchat about wineries' backgrounds. Its WineFinder puts the CalWine folks to work looking for a bottle you can't find. I ordered a 1995 Barnett cabernet sauvignon for $35, plus $22.06 for second-day air. The price was $2 less than at the local wine shop. It arrived in four days (although that included a cold weekend in transit).