Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Amazon’s Wine Venture

Slate’s wine columnist Mike Steinberger started out to take a long look at the rumors about Amazon’s plans to get into the wine business, which morphed into a column on regulation of interstate shipping of wine because there’s still no word as to whether Amazon is really going to get into the wine biz. Do go read the whole thing. Anyway, he includes a nice comment about yours truly:

Stephen Bainbridge, a law professor at UCLA who also maintains an excellent wine blog, is sticking by what he wrote in a column for TCS Daily on the one-year anniversary of the Granholm decision: “We’re no closer to a true national wine market; instead, both producers and consumers are still mired in the economic Balkans.” Bainbridge thinks the best hope of fixing the current distribution system is to challenge it on antitrust grounds. Costco, the country’s largest wine retailer, mounted just such an effort in a suit it brought against the state of Washington four years ago. It won a resounding victory in a federal district court in 2006, but that verdict was overturned in late January by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Costco is appealing to have the case heard by the entire 9th Circuit, and there is a chance the matter will end up before the Supreme Court—eventually. “I am just damn glad I live in California,” says Bainbridge, noting that his home state has some of the most progressive shipping laws in the nation.