Amazon puts a cork in plans to sell wines online

Amazon.com, that mega-giant online purveyor-of-just-about-everything-you-ever-want, has decided the task of selling wine online is too much for even that Web wizard's staff and recently announced it won't be in the wine market, after all. It appears the mystifying hurdles of the three-tier system, not to mention the lingering, 76-year-old shadows of Prohibition, pushed Amazon to drop its plans to distribute wine through its subsidiary, AmazonWine. A test program had been up for about a year, testing the logistic difficulties of dealing with 50 states and their widely varying regulations and limitations. As wine-industry specialist John Fredrikson said in a story on the Web site for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, Seattle-PI.com (see link above), "People have no idea how complex this is, dealing with 50 different (state) governments. You wonder if a company like Amazon, which is well organized to sell just about anything, can't pull it off. But wine is different from anything else they are selling." Wine, indeed, is different, and Jeff Siegel, who writes the always-entertaining blog The Wine Curmudgeon, ventures Amazon's withdrawal from the front line of the wine wars has to do with the lingering effects of Prohibition. You can read his comments here. Amazon's decision will let many distributors breathe easier since it eliminates one more attempt at weakening the three-tier system, which has both detractors and supporters. Online wine sales haven't done well, although one of my favorites sites, Wine Till Sold Out, appears to be doing well. In the final analysis, it might have been the business model, which only on the surface seemed quite capable of selling fermented grape juice, that signaled Amazon's reluctance to continue. As Fredrickson noted in the Seattle-PI.com article, "It's a very complex business which doesn't seem to fit the Amazon model."