At one time, I brought back wine in styro boxes as extra luggage. The trick
was to greet a sky hop at the airport with a $5 or $10 handshake and tell
him there's more if he helps you get your stash on the plane as baggage--you
might be charged by the airline for extra luggage. Since 9/11 I doubt if
this is possible.

UPS in California or other shipping services know by now that the
rectangular box of glassware you are sending to your self or even Aunt Edna
is really wine and will turn you down. As a former broker I found UPS
places, individually owned, willingly went along with the charade and took
my money-one even got me a small insurance payment when my glass jar broke
but this was on the East Coast, this is when I sent samples to
importers/wholesalers etc.

Anyway want you want to send back are wines you can not find in your state
or older vintages. Most wineries retail prices are set high to protect the
wholesalers/retailers who buy from them. Only a few like Mayacamus sold you
a wine at their door way below local retail in the Mid West and East.

Nowadays folks on mailing lists have a number of ploys to get their wines
delivered and there is a little cottage industry made of entrepreneurial
collectors who've joined forces to beat the restrictive laws and cowardly
shipping companies. Basically this involves shipping wine to a state
without restrictions and then trusting the addressee to have good storage
and a modicum of self restraint and integrity. You then have to drive and
pick up the ill gotten booty. Sometimes I have heard that a distributor
will ship back consumers wines with one of his Left Coast shipments. This
is done as a favour to a retail account and the consumer should offer to pay
for the shipping(Between $5-10 a case and offer the wholesaler a bottle for
their trouble) I had some mailing list wine shipped to a West Coast shipper
and then sent to a distributor I was doing business with a regular shipment.
Instead of keeping the case for myself and letting some friends buy a few
bottles, the distributor offered to buy the whole case and let me have one
bottle. Valuing the man's business more than owning the wine I agreed but I
never made this offer again!

Hope that the Supreme Court gets ahold of the shipping issue in our lifetime
and with Ken Starr on the side of Free the Grapes allows us the chance to
buy what we want and shipped to our front doors.

--
Joe "Beppe" Rosenberg
"J. Harris" > wrote in message
link.net...
> Check out http://freethegrapes.org/ for USA wine shipping particulars.
> FWIW, UPS shipments to their mid-atlantic distribution center (Virginia?)
> are routinely destroyed. Acquaintences have had good luck using Air Borne
> Express for shipments to "non-friendly" states.
> --
> J.Harris
>
> "JB" > wrote in message
> ink.net...
> > Hello!
> >
> > I'm considering a trip out west to tour Napa and Sonoma wineries. I live
> in
> > a state that no longer allows wine to be shipped in direct to an
> individual,
> > so no internet sales here. My question: Since wineries and retailers
can't
> > ship to my state, what's to prevent me from assembling a couple of cases
> of
> > wines that I purchase out there and sending it back to me? Are there
> > shipping services available - styrofoam boxes, etc. easily accessible
for
> me
> > to do this? Is the cost reasonable?
> >
> > Thanks for any advice.
> >
> > John
>
>