Another amusing detail is that the deal they're offering as a consolation prize isn't even available to most people. There are very few states they can legally ship wine to. Oops!

umm actually there are quite a few state that allow shipping wine - although the rules are a bit byzantine to say the least.

[wineinstitute.shipcompliant.com]

If you're putting something online, you can never assume it will be small-scale, especially when you're giving something away.

@codpilot: YAY! i can apply for a $25 permit which allows me to transport a gallon of wine in NJ! Wait, that negates any savings!

@jbviau: I must agree. You beat me to posting this. Besides, I only use wine to cook with as I've never had a glass that tasted "good" to me. I probably should look into getting an alcoholic GF to expand my horizons.

I have to confess. I ordered the wine. I figured it cost the same as what I usually buy (~$10/bottle), so why not try it and get a free bottle and free shipping (which has typically hindered me ordering online). At worst, I have a cheap Christmas gift.

the whole notion of physical borders are really just running roughshod with the internet. Iran can't stem the info flow at it's borders. Pacific Rim expects this to be regional. MPAA and the region encoding.

Won't be long now before we are effectively a world-country

The idea of asking permission to link to a Web site is rather quaint and amusing...

Yeah, I think they should have said "without our knowledge" (as in, we didn't know it would spread like this) rather than "without permission".

They might have felt they had to offer something but I think they could have just left it at the apology.

Mass wont let me , i was actually going to take them up on the offer when i got the Email ..

I appreciate their honesty. I don't remember the verbiage from when I signed up, but I assume it was a "while supplies last" offer. If that's the case then they had no obligation do anything further. If I drank more wine, I would have ordered some. It wasn't a bad consolation and was glad to get a response explaining the situation.

@WearingBlue4BillyMays_GitEmSteveDave: As an OT suggestion, try kosher elderberry wine. I've never really liked wine (too dry/bitter/etc...) but I love that stuff.

@Carolyn Gabriel: I will. I live near Kosher central in NJ(Lakewood), so this shouldn;t be a tall order there.

@czadd: I have to agree. It was nice of them to provide a follow-up rather than never getting a tote bag and wondering why. (OK, in fairness, I would have forgotten in a month and would have pleasantly surprised to receive a tote bag in the future.)

I don't see the problem.
They had a limited offer, the limit was reached.
If you got in after the limit, too bad, so sad for you.
You can't rag on a company because the limited offer was not large enough for you to grab freebies, afterall, if everyone could have gotten one, it would not have been very "limited" now, would it?
I for one think it was a noce gesture on thier part to offer the deal to those who missed out. Shame on the Consumerist for ragging on a company who at least tried to make good.

This is a funny bag! I would have gotten one for my Dad (the wine aficionado) if I had known about it. However, the offer sucks if you are in a state that cannot get wine. IN, where I live, makes it not just illegal - but a felony, so no Washington Riesling for Dad.

I have sympathy for this company. I know other small companies who have got swamped by "career" freebie-hunters. Through no fault of their own, they are suddenly made to look like tight opportunists.

Personally, I think the consolation offer was a generous one - remember, they didn't have to offer anything!

As far as linking without permission, here is an incompentent judge that potentially endangers the entire internet by not getting it:

[www.slate.com]

This incompetent judge apparently ignored the conclusion of this legal case (Ticketmaster vs Tickets.com):

"A URL is simply an address, open to the public, like the street address of a building, which, if known, can enable the user to reach the building. There is nothing sufficiently original to make the URL a copyrightable item, especially the way it is used. There appear to be no cases holding the URLs to be subject to copyright. On principle, they should not be."

That, above, is good legal work.

@jonthomasdesigns: That's strange, I've ordered from wine.com before and gotten shipping in MA. I think they have to do some odd thing where they contract with a distributor in RI then the guy in RI trucks it over the border and drops it in the mail from there.

The state government is one of the things in MA I'm *not* fond of....

@Brian James Schend:

True, and while I don't think anyone did anything wrong here. I'd like to put up this example. Say I'm getting married and I have an open bar at the reception. I put the address to the reception on the invitation. That invitation gets mailed to invited guests. If someone then posted the address on craigslist under the headline of "free booze!" there'd be a problem.

However in this case I don't think Pacific Rim did a small mailing, I get the impression they put a link up on their site and it got out of hand. That...would be the equivalent of me putting up a banner myself on the outside of the reception hall then looking surprised when it turned into a very expensive kegger.

Bait and switch?

@WearingBlue4BillyMays_GitEmSteveDave: Pfft. Forget wine altogether. What you need is some ol' fashioned Tennessee strawberry moonshine.

@menty666: I think that's a little different. Unless you're Owen Wilson.

I don't see where they did anything wrong. I always feel bad for the small businesses and some other organizations I see linked to in the 'deals' listings here and elsewhere. This company decided to do something nice for their customers, and probably to get their name out there and get a few new customers, but instead a bunch of people who will fill out a form for ANYTHING if it's free and don't give a damn what it's about now have bags they'll never use.

I go to a big trade show every year with some other people, and it kills me to see how one of them will go to every booth to get at least one, usually two (one for her mom), sometimes more, of EVERY single freebie they can get their hands on. I really don't think a lot of these small companies spend big $$ to go to this big show and get T-shirts printed so your mom can wear a shirt around the house with their logo on it.

My 2¢.

@jbviau: Very few? A winery can ship wine to well over half of the country.

[www.fedex.com]

"(which posted links to our special offer without permission)."

Killed any sympathy for them. They don't own the internet.

@TVGenius: That's the way marketing works. When I plan a promotion or giveaway of some kind I understand that a certain percentage of those giveaways are not going to "customers" per se.

No sane marketer who is trying to promote their product or cause is upset when their promo accidentally goes viral. Likewise, no sane marketer plans to cut off their demand gen at 3,000 leads.

It's more likely that the "apology" is a thinly-veiled attempt to cover the fact that the giveaway was a demand- or lead-generation activity by selling themselves as "green."

They got what they wanted: a huge list of prospects. They could have simply apologized, but now they risk pissing-off more potential customers with the way the apology was executed.

Quoting from their website:

"...Due to state liquor license restrictions, we are only able to ship to the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Texas and Washington. If you are not a resident of one of these states, you do not qualify for this offer. Please contact us for an alternative offer at info@rieslingrules.com."

The "(which posted links to our special offer without permission)" line really got me as well. If you're posting on the internet, it's possible (and in the case of free giveaways, probable) that it'll get out of hand if you haven't taken steps to limit it.

In this case, marketing it as "free giveaway to the first 3000 registrants" would have covered them from the get-go-and would still have allowed them to pitch their consolation discount without coming off like a company that has no experience with modern marketing.

@jbviau: It's nice that they even offer something to residents of states to which they can't even ship, eh?

Their Dry Riesling is pretty good, and I have enjoyed their Gewürztraminer as well. It's readily available at World Market just around the corner, so I don't have to wait for the FedEx guy to bring it. The Sweet Riesling is way too sweet for my tastes, but for lots of people that's the whole point of a Riesling.

I also got this e-mail and I thought it was a fair offer. I thought the bag was hilarious, and I may take try out the wine. What are they supposed to do, make 77,000 more bags?

I got that garbage and immediately unsubscribed from that. I wanted a bag, not a sales pitch.

@speedwell, avatar of snark: Do you know what the alternative offer is? I haven't bothered to email and check.

I can't see what all of the fuss is .. over a tote bag? It appears to have been an honest oversight. You can only hope and wish that something you offer on the Net goes viral, and they just happened to catch a wave.
The letter was well written and explanatory. And why should they just ignore all of those potential customers who are obviously interested in their store and product?

@jbviau: They've worded that very carefully to avoid saying they "can't" ship somewhere else. They choose not to make that service available to their customers for whatever reason. Maybe they don't find it economical to comply with any other state laws, I don't know. CT, for example, requires a winery/distributor to get a permit and pay sales tax while complying with a few other restrictions. There is no problem, in general though, with ordering from wineries in Washington (or other states) and having them delivered here.

Anyone that honestly expected this company to somehow send out free totes to everyone that signed up after slickdeals, this site, and a bunch of other sites posted about it is, quite simply, dumb and naive. The fact is that most that ordered the tote bag have probably never had their wine nor were interested in buying their wine. By sending out the coupon, they at least know who was really interested in wine and not just a free bag. And BTW, it's a fucking bag, if you get all worked up over a tote bag then you have serious issues anyway. I enjoy the calm and measured response on this website so far, but I think Consumerists are also generally pretty intelligent folk.

A quick overview of wine shipping. There are two types of sales. On-site and Off-site. On-site sales are when you visit a winery, buy a few bottles and pay the winery to ship them to you. Off-site are phone or internet orders. Every state is going to have a set of rules for each type of sale, additionally the rules are going to contain rules not only for shipping wine out, but receiving wine shipped to that state.

On-site sales rules are typically laxer because the sale isn't crossing state lines. All the winery needs is a license to sell alcohol. From that point on it's what the shipper is licensed to do. The shipper needs a license from the winery's state to ship liquor out, and a license from your state to ship liquor in. On-site sales are the same as if you bought the wine, drove down to a UPS store and shipped it to yourself.

Off-site sales require a lot more licensing. The winery needs not only a license to sell alcohol, but also a license to ship it out of the state. On top of that depending on what state they are shipping to they may need a license to sell alcohol in the destination state, and a license to ship.

The oversimplified view: a winery potentially needs to obtain 3 extra licenses for every state it wants to sell wine too.

Some states make it easier than others, but for the most part a winery still has to do a lot of extra work for each state. The short list of states Pacific Rim can ship to may just be the states with the simplest requirements and ,as a small winery, they can't afford the time or money to expand their distribution yet.

Meh. So some folks didn't get a free tote bag? What do you expect? All these free offers are always with the understanding that it's free "While supplies last". They got a lot more demand then they anticipated, and being a small independent winery they had no reason to believe that demand for a tote bag would be so great.

The company doesn't owe anyone anything.

I sent them a snotty email back. Their wine does nothing for me since I'm not 21. Not to mention, why buy the wine in the first place? The carbon footprint that would come from them shipping their wine to me outdoes any impact I would have made using their reusable bag. I didn't receive a reply back and I don't expect to see one.

I did note, though, that they should have looked at the link posting as free advertising instead of something that required their "permission".

@GearheadGeek: Really? I generally only drink rieslings so I take every opportunity to try a new one. That said, one day I was feeling adventurous in the grocery store and got a bottle.

Gross. It can function as a mediocre table wine and nothing more. Unfortunately, not many American wineries can get riesling right. Pacific Rim is no exception.