Wine Without Borders

The Fallacy

February 5, 2008 – 4:56 pm

“The world sees the Internet as their friend, they don’t see the danger in it. I guarantee you, if I gave my daughter a gift card or a credit card tomorrow she could order a bottle of vodka on the Internet and get it three days later. They don’t see alcohol as different from other products. We regulate alcohol on a social model, not a business model.”
Craig Wolf, CEO, Wine & Spirit Wholesalers Association, in Eric Asimov’s blog “The Pour”

Let’s do away with this fallacious set of ideas.

“The world sees the Internet as their friend, they don’t see the danger in it.”
First, the Internet is not dangerous. The Internet is a connected series of computers. It is a communications system. The Internet is no more dangerous than the daily paper is dangerous. This kind of comment suggests what many of us have known for some time: generally, alcohol wholesalers and their representatives like Craig Wolf have very little knowledge about those things they attempt to discuss.

“I guarantee you, if I gave my daughter a gift card or a credit card tomorrow she could order a bottle of vodka on the Internet and get it three days later.”
Mr. Wolf can not guarantee his daughter would take possession of a bottle of vodka that she ordered over the Internet. This kind of comment is nothing but either ignorance or sheer rhetoric. Ordering alcohol over the Internet is the same as putting a bottle of vodka on the checkout stand at a liquor store. Just because it has been placed there doesn’t mean the teen will walk out with it and end up drinking it. There are in place age verification service, there is the necessity of getting a signature of an adult at the place of delivery, and there is the small problem of the teen being home alone, without their parents, when the bottle arrives.

“They [I think he means wine drinkers] don’t see alcohol as different from other products.”
Sure we do. We understand that wine is different. You can tell by the fact that it is one of the only products that is still given over to monopolists to control for the benefit of their own bottom line. We see that alcohol is different than soap because we see that the government does not give any single, small, parochial industry complete control over its distribution to the detriment of soap lovers.

“We regulate alcohol on a social model, not a business model.”
This is hard to disagree with. However, I just can’t think of another product or business that is assumed to have changed not at all in the past 70 years. Craig Wolf treats the wine business as though we are still living through the Depression, FDR is in the white house, and a loaf of bread coast 5 cents. And let’s not forget that the wine wholesalers entire business models is predicated upon no one taking not of the fact that we live in the year 2008. The status quo has been good to the business model that wholesalers have come to be fat and wealthy by protecting.

Consumer of wine who read this and wonder why they can’t get their hands on the 1000s of wines they want know who blame for this set of circumstances. There’s something you can do about it.