

For a golden moment, motivated wine lovers could rely on high-speed internet as a sort of national wine shop. A consumer in Little Rock, Ark., for example, unable to find particular bottles locally, could order them from a shop in New York. It required only a willingness to pay shipping costs.

Those days are no more. In the last year or so, carriers like United Parcel Service and FedEx have told retailers that they will no longer accept out-of-state shipments of alcoholic beverages unless they are bound for one of 14 states (along with Washington, D.C.) that explicitly permit such interstate commerce.

New York is not one of those 14 states, as The New York Times’s wine panel learned to its chagrin in the last year.

All of the bottles we sample at our wine tastings are purchased retail. When Bernard Kirsch, our tasting coordinator, could not find the wines he wanted in New York, he ordered from elsewhere, doing regular business with retailers in California and New Jersey, among other places. I, too, like many wine lovers, occasionally bought wine from out-of-state shops for my personal consumption. But that has ended.