Carry-on ban slows vintners' business

By The Los Angeles Times | Monday, August 14, 2006

New security measures banning liquids from airplane carry-on luggage have some California vintners seeing red.

Passengers jamming multi-bottle wine carriers into overhead bins and under seats were a common sight on flights departing from San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento airports until Thursday’s ban — sparked by the British authorities’ foiling of an alleged plot to blow up jetliners.

Since then, unwitting oenophiles have been chugging prized vintages or dumping full bottles of wine into bins with lipstick, sunscreen and other banned liquids.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of cases of wine travel across the country as carry-on luggage, a small, but important part of California’s $16.5 billion wine industry.

“More than half of our tasting room sales are to people who plan to carry the wine onto the plane,” said Michaela Baltasar, spokeswoman for Clos Du Val Wine Co. in the Stag’s Leap district of Napa Valley. “Hardly anybody ever checks it.”

They are people like Linda Ulrich, a congressional aide from Vienna, Va., who on Thursday was tasting the offerings at St. Supery Vineyard and Winery in Napa Valley when she learned about the ban.

“I was going to take a few bottles back because the wine is so much cheaper here,” she said.

Ulrich said several wineries balked at shipping any purchases to her home because of Virginia’s restrictions on direct sales to consumers. She plans to return home from her Napa Valley vacation empty-handed.

On Friday, Clos Du Val began selling 12-bottle foam packing containers to its tasting room customers at cost — $10. Smaller containers are $5. The boxes are sturdy enough to travel as checked baggage, Baltasar said.

Fallout from the ban also is killing wine sales at airport gift and duty free shops and wine bars.