Sooner or later it happens to almost every wine enthusiast who is Internet-savvy. She’s sitting at the computer, surfing around, and comes across a site like wine.com. She looks over the available wines and realizes, “I can’t get some of these where I live.” Deciding that she’d like to try one of the pinot noirs that she’s only heard about, she gets her credit card and begins to place an order.

Then, all of a sudden, it hits her: she can’t complete the transaction. Why? She doesn’t live in one of the states where she can receive shipments of wine.

“What the heck?” she wonders. “I can order khakis from Eddie Bauer’s web site, books from Amazon.com, but I can’t order wine online?”

Sadly, this is a problem for far too many wine consumers who like to engage in electronic commerce. It’s also a problem caused by various state laws, and I happen to know more than the average bear (or even average lawyer) about them. Believing that education is the key to freedom, I offer this primer on the legal issues surrounding wine shipping.

The issues with wine shipping have their roots in that misguided experiment known in the U.S. as Prohibition. When the 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment in the 1930s, the individual states were given the authority to regulate the sale and shipping of alcoholic beverages within their own borders.

Very quickly, most states adopted what’s called the three-tier system of distribution. The first tier is the producer of the beverage, like your favorite winery. The second tier is the wholesaler who buys products from wineries. The third tier is the retailer, who buys the products from the wholesaler in order to sell them to you. Many of these states (with the strong recommendation of the wholesalers) adopted laws that require every drop of alcohol acquired in a state to go through that three-tier system.

In a good number of states, these legal requirements are still in place. In fact, it might surprise you to learn that in various states, it is technically illegal to own a bottle of wine that you bought in a neighboring state or while on vacation in California. Why? Because you haven’t paid your home state’s excise tax on that bottle, and owning wine on which the excise tax isn’t paid is unlawful.

To complicate matters further, some of these states don’t give you any way to even pay the excise tax yourself if you wanted to.

The three-tier distribution system has been around for roughly 70 years, and the wholesalers love it. This system gives them a virtual monopoly on alcohol distribution in the states. A local wine shop in Indiana must buy its wine from one of the licensed wholesalers–and the wholesalers have been very effective at getting states to limit the number of available wholesale licenses.

So, for many years, this “tried and true” system of distribution worked, and no one knew otherwise. Occasionally a wine buyer might visit California and discover that he couldn’t get wine shipped back home, and he’d have to find room for it in the trunk of his car, but otherwise, very few people were bothered by the three-tier system.

But now we’re in the information age. Even before the Internet, publications like Wine Spectator and the Wine Advocate brought reams of information to wine drinkers about wines they had never heard of. After finding the wines were not available in their local wine shops, the wine enthusiasts would call the winery and try to order the wine. In some cases, the winery could go through a few extra hoops to find a way around the shipping restrictions. In others, the consumer was just out of luck.

Today, people are used to buying stuff online. Everything from books to tires to socks is available with the click of the mouse button. Everything, that is, except wine and other alcoholic beverages.

Now, it’s true that some states will allow you to have wine shipped to you. These states are so-called “reciprocal states,” meaning that if a certain state will allow other states to ship in, that state will ship to those other states. California and Illinois are but two examples of states that have this arrangement. They also use the three-tier system, but allow shipping of limited quantities as an exception to the system.

So what’s a wine drinker in a non-reciprocal state to do? Well, roughly ten years ago a group of intrepid wine drinkers from Indiana decided that they’d had enough. In the next post, the tale of Russ Bridenbaugh will be told. Stay tuned.