It still boggles the mind that a product that is so ubiquitous as wine would be ILLEGAL to ship anywhere. It’s not like we’re talking about explosives or anthrax. It’s wine. Anyone, anywhere, anytime can go down to their local supermarket and buy as much as they want. So why the big deal? Why waste millions of dollars in legislation and man power fighting this?
Distributors.
I can understand that the point of view of a distributor is that direct to consumer shipping, especially from domestic wineries, will steal market share from their businesses. The flaw in this argument, is that most of the wineries that are truly interested in making their small business work through D2C shipping are too small to work with many distributors. They simply don’t have the volume. Even if they could afford to supply many different distributors with a pallet per month, they run the risk of running out of inventory for territories where they sell well and being ignored by or buried in the portfolios of bigger distributors.
Wine will never stop being put on shelves. And just as this will always remain the main model for buying wine, the distributor will have his place. It’s just that the precise description of that place needs to be revisited to account for small producers to sell D2C.
That said, if a distributor can pay attention to lower volume wineries and develop their brands with an understanding of their inventory levels and marketing budget, this should actually reinforce business for both the winery selling D2C and the distributor selling on the shelf.
This is not rocket science, people, its just selling wine bottles. The harder we make it for everyone, the more the consumer suffers and the smaller the overall marketplace.
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