A word/question about shipping 'plonk' wine
OK
My first big question is: How am I supposed to legally send out samples to people in the wine business in order to generate interest?
Quick story - My day job is in the software biz and I recently attended Blog World Expo in Las Vegas to learn more about Social Media. The keynote speaker was Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV fame. At the end of his presentation, I asked about the software project I was working and then I gave him a bit of information about the wine project as well. To make a long story short, Gary told me that if I sent him my wine, he would put it on his show. Now the shipping part begins.
I go online to boxvendor.com and order 20 2 bottle pack styrofoam shippers. They took about a week to arrive and cost me just over $100 for everything. I also bought a large stamp with our 'plonk' logo to stamp the outside of the boxes. I boxed up 2 2-packs to send to Gary V in New Jersey and also Arthur Perley of VINO! in Berkeley, CA, who I met through this blog - the wine's on it's way Arthur!
Now comes the interesting part. I take the 2 boxes to UPS and as they are measuring them the counter person asks if there is wine in the boxes. Obviously I say, "yes" to which a woman sending Xmas presents responds angrily "you can't do that - that's illegal". She then goes on to tell the UPS guy that the reason you can't send wine is because it's flammable. Did you get that - "FLAMMABLE". Just as I was getting ready to address her 'concerns' I realized that I now have a brand and I must do everything I can to be polite, even in circumstances where a slight correction of misconceptions or misinformation might have been appropriate.
I won't write what happened next for fear of the BATF swat team showing up at my house for trying to send wine to those who may be interested in promoting or selling it.
The fact that the shipping of wine is illegal, for whatever reason, is ludicrous. Any suggestions from anyone out there on how this can be remedied? I understand that the very Distributors that I will be trying to team up with are probably the ones most responsible for this but how am I supposed to get my wines to those Distributors if I can't send it?
