Sour Grapes

Jonathan Newman, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, resigned yesterday. If you don't live in Pennsylvania, this will probably elicit, at best, a yawn. For those of us in the Keystone, thought, this is a big deal. See, the state has a monopoly on buying and selling wine & spirits here. The only place you can buy wine and hard liquor are at state-run stores, and this guy was head of the organization in charge of this process. Therefore, this is legitimately big news.

He apparently did a lot to improve the selection in the stores, he instituted Sunday wine sales, and I believe he was responsible for the really nice search functionality on the Board's website. It would seem his resignation was due to Governor Rendell appointing a former state Senator to act as CEO of the board, at a salary more than double Newman's, which doesn't seem right considering how much Newman apparently did during his tenure.

Now I only moved to Pennsylvania 18 months ago, so I can't speak to whether Newman truly revolutionized wine buying in PA, but a couple of quotes in that Patriot-News story really caught my eye. The first is this quote from San Francisco Chronicle wine writer W. Blake Gray:

"In less than three years, Newman has transformed Pennsylvania from an enological backwater into arguably the best place in America to buy wine."

Gray gets bonus points for using the word "enological" (but not too many -- after all he is a wine writer, and isn't it supposed to be "oenological"?), but immediately loses those points for making a statement that's absurd on its face. I lived in the Bay Area for 6 years and if this guy seriously thinks Pennsylvania is a better place to buy wine than California, he's straight-up nuts.

The other killer quote is from Senator John Rafferty, in charge of the committee which oversees the PLCB, and obviously a big fan of Newman:

"He has completely modernized the sale of liquor in Pennsylvania and has moved us into the 21st century."

Into the 21st Century? Please. Nothing's more 21st century than the Internet, but you can't use the Series Of Tubes to ship wine to PA. Go to wine.com or wine.woot and try to ship a bottle of vino to me. You can't. No less an authority than the Supreme Court says you should be able to -- they ruled that preventing an out-of-state winery from shipping into a state is a violation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution -- but PA hasn't gotten around to changing their laws to be, you know, constitutional. Anyone know how Rendell's draft legislation on this topic fared this fall?

But you know, allowing us to buy wine over the Internet is a big step. Why not start small, and let us buy wine in more places than just state-run liquor stores? If I'm having a party and I need to stock up on wine, beer, and snacks, I have to make three stops: at a Wine & Spirits shop, at a beer distributor (or bar), and at a grocery store. That is flat-out ridiculous.

Unfortunately, the chances of this changing anytime soon seem pretty slim. After all, there was $1.6 billion in wine and spirit sales in PA last year, and the state not only gets to collect taxes on that, it gets to make a profit, too. Why would they possibly give that up?