mhicken November 3rd, 2009
Sanity has prevailed at City Hall. The City of Vancouver has withdrawn the proposed “anti-wine” bylaw and it will not be considered in its original form. The bylaw would have required restaurants to monitor food and liquor sales and ensure that food sales always exceeded liquor sales in any 8 hour period. The law was administratively unworkable and could have seriously affected the sale of fine wines which would have skewed sales to liquor in the absence of huge expenditures on corresponding amounts of food. There will now be a “rethink” and further consultation with the industry.
Tags: bylaw, city, food, law, liquor, Restaurants, vancouver, wine
mhicken October 23rd, 2009
In two unrelated pieces of news today:
Amazon.com is apparently giving up on its fledgling wine business. This will likely be welcome news for wine retailers in the U.S. who would have had to compete with Amazon. However, it demonstrates the extreme difficulties of dealing with the post-prohibition patchwork regulatory system in the U.S. which make the inter-state shipping of wine a legal nightmare.
Speaking of nightmares and just in time for Halloween, the City of Vancouver has put forth a nightmarish bylaw proposal for city restaurants under which they would be required to continuously check their liquor and food sales such that liquor sales never exceed food sales in any 8 hour period. The proposed law seems ridiculous from a policy perspective as well as administratively unworkable. Theoretically, a restaurant would have to stop selling expensive bottles of wine during the evening if they thought that food sales might not match the wine sales total. Who dreams up this stuff? And, more to the point, why is taxpayers’ money being spent on this?
Tags: amazon, bylaws, food, law, liquor, Restaurants, sales, vancouver, wine
mhicken March 12th, 2009
Our related web site, Free the Wine in BC, is now live. The Free the Wine coalition is dedicated to reforming BC’s arcane wine laws and reducing our wine tax levels to sensible levels. If you support our goals, please join the coalition on the site and, importantly, please also contact your MLA to request reform.
An op/ed piece appeared in today’s Vancouver Sun, “It’s time to get B.C. wine regulations out of the dark ages“, describing our objectives and the problems with BC’s system of wine regulation. In my opinion, reform of the system is long overdue on multiple fronts. Let’s try and make it happen before the Olympics.
Tags: government, law, LDB, reform, regulation, taxes, wine
admin July 29th, 2008
I wrote earlier about some problems that various companies (such as MSN) were having with French internet marketing laws regarding wine. The problems continue as a leaked version of the proposed French internet marketing laws will treat wine and other alcohol in a category along with porn. Apparently, an organized anti-alcohol lobby has been effective in creating severe restrictions on all alcohol related marketing and advertising on the internet. Basically, wine producers will be permitted to market using web sites in a restricted fashion but no third parties will be permitted to promote those sites so the sites will become lame ducks. Intense criticism is now coming from the wine industry and there are hopes that the laws will not be passed. For the full story see this Decanter article on the proposed marketing laws. As I noted earlier, apparently we don’t have a monopoly on foolish liquor laws in Canada.
Tags: france, internet, law, marketing, wine
