Why no wine online in Mass.?

(BostonGlobe) - Massachusetts is home to some of the nation’s most enthusiastic wine drinkers, and Rick Libby of Ipswich is one of them. Libby is the owner of a California winery and the founder of The Traveling Vineyard, which promotes and sells wines through home-based wine tastings around the country. His passion for wines is infused with good humor; on his website and voicemail greeting, Libby identifies himself as “chief grape stomper and head cheerleader.”

But when the subject turns to regulation — in particular his home state’s bizarre prohibition on the shipment of wine directly to consumers — Libby is frustrated.

“I’ve had a real civics lesson,” he was saying the other day, when I called to ask what progress he had seen since testifying on Beacon Hill last fall in support of a bill, H. 294, allowing Massachusetts residents to have wine shipped to them from wineries in other states. “Here is something that almost everyone is in favor of — a chance to finally fix an antiquated system that should have gone out with the temperance movement.” The legislation, written by Representative Ted Speliotis of Danvers, has drawn the support of wine-lovers ranging from Governor Deval Patrick, who has said he would gladly sign the bill, to former New England Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe, who now operates Doubleback Winery in Washington state.

There seems little reason to doubt that the bill would pass if it were brought to the floor. Yet it remains stuck in limbo, to Libby’s mystified consternation. “How can something so popular not get anywhere?” he laments. “Something is going on that I don’t understand.”

But Speliotis, who has logged 25 years in the Legislature’s sausage factory, isn’t surprised. Massachusetts liquor laws “haven’t changed much since the 1930s,” he says. Neither have the tired arguments made against lifting restrictive wine laws. “The fear is that if customers can order wine online and have it shipped to their homes, they’ll stop doing business at their local package store.” Of course, by that logic legislators should prohibit Massachusetts consumers from having anything delivered to them from out of state that they could buy from a local dealer