PLCB Wine Kiosk Follow-up: (Not) Drinking Local

PennLive.com reportedly recently on the prototype wine kiosks in Pennsylvania that have been creating so much buzz – and ire – in the media lately.

What PennLive.com has pointed out is that the new-fangled Pennsylvania wine kiosks will contain no actual wines from Pennsylvania. Which is a blow to PA’s 100+ state wine producers, some of whom are making excellent wine (albeit in very small quantities) well worthy of more public attention.

This news comes just when I was starting to see an upside to these bizarre wine kiosks – namely, that it would mean a wine transaction without face-to-face contact with a PLCB employee, many of whom don’t know much about wine and some of whom have denied the very existence of Cabernet Franc.

Part of the issue for PA wine producers is that they’re too small to play in the state’s enormous monopoly wine distribution and sales system, which is prohibitively expensive for those smaller outfits – according to PennLive.com:

“Pennsylvania wine producers 773,100 gallons in 2008, and slightly less than 14 percent was sold through state stores, according to the PLCB. Selling to the state system means going through a process to get listed as a supplier to the PLCB. Only about 15 of the state’s 123 wineries have that status. To be listed, a vineyard has to deliver its product to the PLCB’s warehouse so it can be sold at Wine & Spirits Shoppes around the state. But it takes a larger-scale operation than most small wineries to pull that off…”

Certainly economics plays heavily into the decision to exclude PA wines (for now, anyway) – there just aren’t enough local wines from PA being sold via the PLCB, and the lower volume means fewer discount opportunities vs. other purchases that the PLCB can make.

Still, one would think that inclusion among the limited number of choices available in the wine kiosks, if rolled out to 100 stores statewide as is the current plan by the PLCB, would be a boon to PA’s local wine market and a move that would endear the PLCB to PA’s own in-state producers and locapours everywhere.

And it seems that the locapour movement is growing: earlier this year, DrinkLocalWine.com held the 2010 Drink Local Wine Conference in Virginia, and the state will host the 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference in Charlottesville (that news even made the Associated Press).

Seems that Local Wine in the U.S. is cursed to live in interesting times!

Cheers!

Joe Roberts is a Certified Specialist of Wine and author of the award-winning 1WineDude.com wine blog.

New PLCB Wine Kiosks As Easy As 1,2,5,7,10…

Those of you who don’t have the (sometimes mis-) fortune of living in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania probably haven’t been following the entertaining on-going saga of the Wine Kiosk.
This strange idea is the brain-child of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, who have a state-run monopoly on the sale and distribution of alcohol in the Commonwealth (at this point, you might be wondering what the difference is between “State” and “Commonwealth” – “Commonwealth” allows you to have a billion more levels of government that can tax that hell out of you, I think). And the fine blogger and fellow PA-resident Lew Bryson has a particularly insightful take on the new kiosks, which have now entered the prototype phase.
Lew posted a video from the Harrisburg Patriot-News in which one of their reporters attempts to purchase wine from the kiosks, which the PLCB claim can safely dispense wine to a non-inebriated customer of legal drinking age in 20 seconds or less.
It takes the reporter over 10 steps and 2 and half minutes to complete a transaction of purchasing one bottle from the kiosk. During the purchase, he has to –

• Scan his driver’s license & credit card
• Give his signature
• Things get significantly weirder from there though – he also has to blow into an attached breathalyzer (which the PLCB warns “It is possible the machine may detect alcohol when a consumer hasn’t been drinking”), and
• Stand in front of a camera so that a PLCB employee at a remote site can ID him.

Call me crazy, but I do not want to be the first person whose data gets hacked from one of these kiosks, since it sounds like enough data that it could be used by evil scientists to physically clone you and recreate your full identity. Big Brother is not watching you… we swear!
I’m stumped as to how the wine kiosk is a viable alternative to an actual human selling wine, or any safer than buying a wine from a trusted retailer over the Internet. Especially when you consider that Pennsylvania’s underage drinking rate remains above average for the 50 states and the Commonwealth remains above average in DUI fatalities per mile driven. It’s tough to blame PA residents like me for feeling a bit bitter, or faulting them if they conclude that the PLCB isn’t delivering on all of its promises or potential value for money.
Cheers!
Joe Roberts is a Certified Specialist of Wine and author of the award-winning 1WineDude.com wine blog.