Shipping from italy to us?
 

Looking forward to trip to Italy & purchasing cases of wine. Anyone know the most economcal way to ship back to US? Approximately how much per case?

I'm interested to see if you can even do it. In the states you can't ship btwn alot of the states. I would think the U.S. wine importers have it wrapped dup so that you can't ship it in from other countries as an individual, but I am interested to find out from the answers you get.

My sister honeymooned in Tuscany last year & shipped (2) cases back. However, she just let the vineyard handle the shipping. It was quite expensive.

It really depends on what state you live in & if it accepts wine shipments in general. There are states that are very strict & those that openly permit shipments. Now, she happened to live in (1)of those strict states & shipped it anyway. They said that the contents were olive oil. Now, they were given a hard time by the post office since (1) of their bottles of '97 Brunello broke and the box was stained red. Nevertheless, the post office simply stated not to do it again & gave them their wine.

If you want to know what is being done to change some of the archaic wine laws regarding shipping.....look here

http://www.freethegrapes.org/

We shipped a case back from Tuscany last fall and it cost about $100 via Fed Ex. It beat us home though so make sure you have someone to take in your packages if you aren't home-you wouldn't want your wine to freeze or over heat!

A friend of mine was in Italy for 6 months last year and wanted to ship a few cases of wine home also. He researched the different methods, and found out that the best way was to actually find a distributor in the US that sells the same wine, or one that would buy it for you and then you could buy it from the distributor directly. It ended up costing less than having to ship it himself. I don't know if this is true for all wines or just the type that he wanted. Good luck and enjoy your trip!

thanks everyone for the info:-) It is very helpful.