The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board has temporarily halted the permitting process by which “special liquor order” wines and spirits are approved for sale in the state, thanks to a months long backlog of pending items.
The logjam is frustrating the vendors, particularly small wine importers, who rely on the special order process to move their niche products into bars, restaurants and homes.
On Jan. 8, a supervisor at the PLCB’s Bureau of Product Selection sent an email to the state’s dozens of wine and spirits vendors, notifying them that “there is a backlog of new items waiting to be processed and approved through SLO. … Unfortunately, with the number of items waiting to be approved and the number of new items being entered on a daily basis, it will take some time to get back to a normal processing time frame. In order to facilitate approving the items already entered and waiting for approval, we will” stop accepting new items for the month of January.
The PLCB said the slowdown is largely a manpower issue — last summer, the agency’s special liquor order processing unit lost two of its four data-entry employees. The agency has since hired one replacement, and hopes to hire another soon.
Meanwhile, specialty wine and spirits vendors are putting off orders, or sitting on products, unable to sell it in Pennsylvania.
“The gatekeeper has closed the gates,” said Mike Gonze, president of Dreadnought Wines in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. “I’ve got products in the pipeline that I can’t sell, because they didn’t get approved.”
That pipeline is largely hidden from everyday state store shoppers, but it is more visible to those in the hospitality industry, especially restaurants that specialize in wine selection. That’s because for every wine or spirit that is “listed” by the PLCB, and widely available on liquor store shelves, there are many more that are available for purchase only through the agency’s “special order” process.
There are about 1,800 “regular” spirits products that are available for sale directly through the state’s wine and spirits stores and online — but more than 3,000 are available through the special order process. And while there are 2,400 high-volume “regular” wines, there are nearly 40,000 wines and annual vintages available only through the special order process.
The process works like this: A vendor finds a new wine or spirit and wants to distribute it to buyers in Pennsylvania. First, the vendor must ask the state to approve the new item. Once that item is approved — a process that used to take a few weeks but now is taking several months — an individual buyer or a restaurant can order it by calling the PLCB’s special purchases division, or by stopping by a state store to place the special liquor order in person.
After the order has been made — some vendors require a minimum order of six bottles — the vendor sells the product to the state, which applies its own price markup and re-sells the item to the end buyer and delivers it to a wine and spirits store for pickup.
It’s a complicated process, complicated further by the slowdown. Small vendors who don’t represent or import high-volume wines and spirits rely on the special liquor order process for much, if not all, of their sales traffic.
“The backlog goes back to the summer,” said Raj Sabharwal, the Pittsburgh-based managing director representative for Purple Valley Imports, a small Canadian importer that specializes in Indian and Scotch whiskies.
While Mr. Sabharwal handles sales across the U.S., “I’m not able to sell the products that I’d like to into my own market.” He said Purple Valley has about 10 new selections still waiting for special liquor order approval with the PLCB, including a new Canadian rye, some single-malt and single-cask scotches, and a few rums.
It’s the same story at the Strip District’s Barsotti Wines.
“We have a new winery from California that we are excited to introduce, and now we can’t,” said Ruth Barsotti, whose company also imports a few vodkas and rums, in addition to hundreds of wine vintages.
She said the logjam — and the January stoppage — are a “minor aggravation” for Barsotti Wines, because most of her backlogged orders are not new products, but just updated vintages of wine brands that Barsotti already sells (a new vintage year is, technically, a different product in the eyes of the PLCB, and must be approved by the state just like a new brand would be).
Still, she doesn’t believe the solution to the logjam is to stop taking new orders, because once the PLCB unkinks the hose, there will be thousands of unsubmitted products newly waiting in the queue.
“I’m sorry that [the PLCB is so] busy, but it hurts us,” Ms. Barsotti said. “And it hurts the consumer.”
Dale Horst, PLCB’s director of marketing and merchandising, said the volume of special-order products has roughly doubled in the last few years.
“Three to four years ago, we were in the mid-20,000s for [special liquor order] product offerings,” he said. Now, there are well more than 40,000 items, plus tens of thousands of outdated or nonexistent special liquor order items that must be deleted from the state catalog each year.
Mr. Horst said the PLCB is planning to install a system that allows for greater automation of order processing, which could help to alleviate future delays.
First Published: January 22, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
