Texas, making things complicated since 1845

Our guest from Wine Direct spoke briefly about the challenges of shipping wine around the country when there are so many different liquor laws in different states.  Well, I spent most of my adult life in the state with arguably the most complicate patchwork of alcohol regulations in the county - Texas. The Lone Star state has a lot of things going for it, but some regions sure do make it hard to enjoy a glass of wine.

Rather than having blanket state-wide policies that apply to the sale and consumption of alcohol, Texas pushes this policy decision down to the county and municipality level. Each county can make its own laws related to the sale and consumption of alcohol, and some counties even allow cities and towns within the country to make their own independent decisions that only apply within city borders. On top of this, Texas has 254 counties - more than any other state in the country.

Some counties are fully dry, meaning you can't buy or sell alcohol in stores or restaurants. Others are fully wet, meaning that beer, wine, and spirits are available at both restaurants and stores (with the proper licenses, of course). Most counties, though, are "moist", meaning there are combinations of wet and dry areas, or that the sale of alcohol is otherwise limited in some way. The map below illustrates this point.

Here are some examples I've personally encountered on road trips and other adventures of what the laws in a moist country can look like:

• Alcohol is for sale in restaurants in bars, but you can't buy it packaged (e.g. in a grocery store or liquor store)
• Only beer and wine are allowed in restaurants, but all alcohol is available for sale in stores
• Wine and beer can be purchased until midnight, but spirits only until 9pm
• A town is dry but the county in which it resides is wet (the inverse also exists)

I could keep going - as you can tell, there are almost endless combinations and permutations of various laws regulating the sale and consumption of alcohol.

This has resulted in an often confusing combination of hyper-local laws and behaviors based on those laws. For example, you can always tell when a country is dry and the county next door is not - there will be a string of liquor stores on a highway seemingly in the middle of nowhere, right on the country line, so that people from the dry country don't have to go as far as the next town to buy alcohol. Spirits are almost never sold in grocery stores, so most strip-malls with a grocery store also have a liquor store (normally owned by the grocery store) right next door. Dry cities will vote themselves wet one year and vote themselves back to being dry years later. I could go on.

Thankfully, I spent most of my time in Dallas and Austin, where buying wine for home or having a glass at a restaurant was always easy.