Wine Shipping and the Road To the Supreme Court

Follow the bouncing court case.

Bringing a case all the way up to the Supreme Court is a daunting task. However, all that can be done to convince the Court to address the constitutionality of states’ bans on interstate retailer-to-consumer wine shipments has been done. And now, it’s in the Court’s hands to decide if they will hear the case.

How is the road to the Supreme Court navigated?

The very first step in bringing a case to the Supreme Court is identifying an instance where the constitutional rights of a person or entity can be claimed to be violated. The state of Arizona allows AZ wine retailers to ship wine directly to consumers. However, consumers in Arizona may not receive shipments of wine from out-of-state retailers. Clearly, there is harm being done to both Arizona wine lovers and legal wine retailers based on the discrimination in the law as it applies to in-state versus out-of-state retailers.

So the first step was to file a complaint in the Federal District Court of Arizona. This was done nearly five years ago in July 2021. Following a team of lawyers filing the complaint, written briefs were filed by the attorneys explaining why Arizon’s ban on wine shipments from out-of-state retailers violated the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution and also ignored two Supreme Court decisions that appeared to confirm that a state may not require that a company establish a physical presence in a state where it wants to do business (Granholm v. Heald and Tennessee Wine v. Thomas).

The state of Arizona, with assistance from the Arizona Wine & Spirit Wholesalers, replies in writing explaining why the consumers, retailers, and their attorneys are wrong and that there is no constitutional violation. This is followed by a Replay Brief from the consumers and retailers challenging the Arizona law.

All of this leads to the Federal District Court rendering a decision on the question. And it did. In 2023, the District Court decided that requiring out-of-state retailers to open an outlet in Arizona in order to ship wine was, in fact, not discriminatory, and the court ruled for the state of Arizona. The retailers and the consumers lost the case, and it took two years.

But the road to the Supreme Court obviously doesn’t end there.