Burgundy Bootlegger

Many of Nashville’s wine and spirit purveyors have a distaste for the Tennessee Alcohol and Beverage Commission matched only a by a pants-pissing fear of the agency’s power to put them out of business.

The ABC’s stated mission is to enforce all laws related to the liquor industry, including how, when, where and by whom booze is sold or poured in the Volunteer State. But those in Nashville’s liquor industry say the agency is guilty of harassment, indiscriminant punishment and worse. One woman who works for a large liquor distributor says an ABC inspector scrutinized her every move, implied that she was breaking the law and generally “treated me like I was gang-raping orphans” at a recent wine tasting.

And one Nashville store owner says that when an inspector visited recently, he was concerned by a “rare and hard-to-find” wine that the store was selling. “When I found out they were talking about some cases of Woodbridge, I nearly died laughing,” the man says. Woodbridge, a widely available and moderately priced wine from California, is about as rare as a Toyota Corolla.

The ABC also has made the news lately for some practices that—while legal—are widely unpopular.

Newspaper accounts showed that there was collusion between liquor distributors and the ABC. The deals kept fines low and ensured that federal authorities never found out about violations by industry heavyweights.

In 2005, the ABC promised to drop enforcement of certain rules against restaurants if a proposed bill seeking to curtail the agency’s regulatory power disappeared. The gambit worked, and the bill was withdrawn.

In November, the ABC drew the ire of pretty much every drinker in Tennessee when it announced plans to destroy thousands of bottles of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7—some of them hundreds of years old—found during warehouse raids. The ABC condemned the hooch to the sewer because they suspected that the bottles had been sold by an unlicensed dealer.

And now there’s the case of Melanie Armstrong.

When you think of bootleggers, images of roughneck hillbillies careening around dusty switchbacks in souped-up stock-cars generally come to mind. Think Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road.

Perhaps less obvious is the image of a professional 29-year-old, a “wine educator” who offers private lessons on wine pairings, tastings and regions. Her troubles began in September when she was to host a singles wine tasting and scavenger hunt at Cabana in Hillsboro Village.

“Typically, when I have an event like that I have the wines donated by an importer,” Armstrong says. The importer calls a local distributor and the distributor delivers the wine to the tasting location. As luck would have it, on the week of this particular event Armstrong’s importer was from outside the country, unreachable by phone or email, and hadn’t delivered the wine to Cabana or filled out the proper paperwork with a local distributor.

“I was getting really nervous,” says Armstrong. “The night of the event came up, and I had 35 people coming…. I had to get the wine somehow.”

She turned to her friend Ed Fryer, who owns and operates the Wine Shoppe at Green Hills. “I knew that he [Fryer] had a good relationship with the importer,” Armstrong says. So she bought the wine from Fryer, knowing that the importer would reimburse her.

There was nothing normal about what happened next.

When Armstrong arrived at Cabana with an armload of wine, ABC inspector Debra Warren arrived for a regularly scheduled visit.

“I didn’t know she was an ABC agent when I walked up,” Armstrong says. “She asked me, ‘Are you having a tasting here?’ I thought she wanted to participate, so I was like, ‘You should totally come. It’s a singles event and it’s really fun. Are you single?’ ”

Though Armstrong never ascertained Warren’s dating status, she quickly learned that the woman was an ABC inspector. “I was like, ‘Aw, fuck,’ ” she says. She had heard horror stories from friends in the industry about staggering fines for seemingly minor infractions. But Armstrong knew that she was operating inside the law. Wine tastings are public events, and the liquor was donated, so there isn’t any taxable profit. She also knew that the ABC could make her life miserable if it wanted to.

“The first thing I said was, ‘Is there going to be a problem, because if there’s going to be a problem, we’ll just cancel the event right now?’ ”

She says that Warren responded by saying, “Oh, there’s definitely going to be a problem, I just don’t know what it is yet.” Warren then got on her cell phone and called her supervisor.

Armstrong immediately decided to cancel the event. She told the inspector of her intention to do so and began packing up her wine.