You continue to make me happy that my tax dollars are not helping pay your salary any longer.

One more time:

1) What is your business relationship with WTSO?

2) Do you represent as a wholesaler or in any other capacity the wines that you rate on WTSO?

3) Do you financially benefit from sales of wines that you rate on WTSO?

4) In your professional opinion, if you have financial interests, are you committing fraud by not revealing these interests when providing ratings on WTSO and should you be sanctioned by the appropriate PA and/or NJ legal disciplinary body as a result?

Until you can answer these and related questions you’ll remain a joke to many.

The first is the board’s ill-conceived attempt to pretend it’s part of – rather than an impediment to – Philadelphia’s thriving restaurant scene.

The agency opened its first “wine boutique” this year inside Garces Trading Co., a Center City restaurant-market owned by celebrity chef Jose Garces. The odd public-private partnership allows Garces to operate a BYOB – saving the expense of a liquor license and the requisite insurance – while enjoying the extraordinary benefit of having the bottles in the same building. Patrons can buy wine at regular State Store prices and walk it into the café, which can even swap warm bottles for chilled ones.

A group of Center City restaurateurs – including owners of both BYOBs and liquor-licensed establishments – has responded with a richly deserved lawsuit against the Liquor Control Board, arguing that the deal gives Garces an unfair advantage. It’s hard to see how a reasonable judge could find otherwise.

The Garces store is unique statewide, and the LCB is vague about plans for other such boutiques. Moreover, even if the agency opened five or 10 more in-café State Stores, they would still amount to a government-granted advantage for arbitrarily chosen businesses. That’s the trouble with state control of a trade that so clearly belongs in the private sector.

The LCB revealed another botched cosmetic surgery recently when it test-launched new wine vending machines in two central Pennsylvania supermarkets.

The machines, which could be deployed more broadly later this summer, allow prospective connoisseurs to select bottles using an ATM-style touch screen. Buyers must then swipe a driver’s license to prove they are of age, exhale into a Breathalyzer to prove they are not (yet) drunk, and pay with a debit or credit card. All of this is monitored remotely by an LCB employee, who peers at a video camera feed to make sure every oenophile matches his ID.

Make it through this Rube Goldberg process and – voilà! – you have just completed a transaction that, under normal circumstances, would require nothing but a few more supermarket shelves.

Only a hopelessly archaic bureaucracy could produce such a reinvention of the wheel – or, in this case, of supermarket Aisle 3. Maybe the futurists at the liquor agency will even figure out how to let us buy wine on this Internet thing we’ve been hearing about!

The current age of austerity has already had the accidental benefit of ending some of our most egregious government excesses. State after state, for example, has decided it can no longer afford to lock people up for a little marijuana. How long before Pennsylvania realizes it’s run out of money and reasons to lock up all the booze?

I was one of the people questioning Jonathan Newman and WTSO. It is hopeless and dishonest. Jonathan is a wholesaler, selling wines to WTSO. He reviews them for WTSO, with BIG, FAT scores. The people buying have no idea of the conflict of interest.

On topic, I love the kiosk idea. Why hate on it? I would prefer the wines to be on the grocery store shelves, but in lieu of that, this is brilliant.

Sarah.

By law in New York, a drunk person cannot be served alcohol, whether in a bar or in a store. This came about when they invented these things called automobiles. When drunk people started driving them, innocent people were killed.

I applaud your business success and contributions to the community which makes it all more puzzling to me why you would continue to perpetrate such an unethical practice as not revealing your financial interests in the wines you rate on WTSO and in WTSO itself– if in fact you do have such an interest. Since you’re not denying it I can only assume it’s true. Maybe that’s not fair to assume. What do you think?

Again, I’ve no affiliation with PLCB and am no fan of a state controlled monopoly but it seems a bit irresponsible to me that you show up, slander the organization and its motives, and then disappear while not answering any questions about your own practices. Kind of a “hit and run” I suppose.

This apparent conflict of interest is a shame really as you’ve done so much to improve accessibility to wine at decent prices.

Since you’re a lawyer maybe you can help us lay people understand, if your financial interest exists…is this fraud? Does it constitute grounds for being sanctioned by the same disciplinary board you chaired? I’m just curious.

Again, let me be clear. If you’re not benefiting in any way from WTSO or the wines they sell and you rate, I apologize for raising the issue of lack of transparency and extend my appreciation for your efforts.

The kiosks are a shockingly poor response to a discussion that has been ongoing. Grocery stores like Wegman’s and Fresh Market are already circumventing some of the state liquor laws by selling beer (and I think wine), in their cafes. As I understand it, Wegman’s is preparing a lawsuit in order to sell wine from the shelf.

But that still leaves Pennsylvanians with a wine selection that is no better than they currently have. Big volume producers and mostly mediocre wine.

Until the entrenched PLCB loosens it’s grip on the sale of wine and permits smaller independent wine store owners with a passion for the wines they sell, the selection will remain pedestrian.

I have no problem with grocery stores selling wine as well (I believe their customers are a different market), I have no problem with the state stores continuing to sell wine and control hard liquor. I just look forward to the day that independent wine store merchants are granted licenses.