Wine shopping in NY state for Canadians...

As the Canadian dollar is rocking and at par or better with the US, a lot of Ontario residents are looking to the South for deals. Wine shopping in NY State is a great experience - a wider selection on wine, especially California based wines. You will see a number of labels that you'll have never seen in the LCBO. You will also see older wines - French wines from the 80's and 90's also on store shelves in the US.

Now you are entitled to 1.5L of wine duty-free if you are down in the US for 48 hours. That's great but not really worth the gas and hotel costs to score two bottles of wine duty-free.

So this will blog focus on a day trip down to NY and what you can expect to pay in duty.

How much wine can you bring back if you are willing to pay duty?

45L.

Is that 45L per car or per person?

We had a Customs person check this the last time we went down and the answer is 45L per person. This means if you go down with your spouse or a friend you can bring back 90L or 10 cases of wine (750mL bottles).

How much is the duty?

Rough and dirty you will get dinged 64% on the value of the wine in CDN dollars. So if a bottle of wine is $10 in the US, you will have to pay $6.40 in duty on that bottle. Even with a 64% duty, there are some deals to be had. Robert Mondavi Private Selection Chardonnay is $18.15 in the LCBO, in NY it can be found for $8.99 a bottle, so $9 plus 64% duty = $14.76, that is a $3.39 savings per bottle. That doesn't seem like much but buy 1 case of that wine and that is $40.68 in savings... that will pay for you gas and now every bottle/case you buy is money in your pocket. What is even better, is a lot of NY based wine store offer a 5-10% discount on cases, so then the savings get even better.

Now these types of savings are nice, but my next trip down to NY will probably be in the next couple of weeks and my main purpose for going isn't to save money but to buy wines that aren't currently available in the LCBO.

So whether you are going NY for the savings or the selection, it is a good time to be a Canadian!

Cheers!

Mark