Other soccer discussion boards, like the Washington Post’s Soccer Insider, were flooded with debate and discussion about the questionable call, which began almost immediately after it happened at about 16:40 GMT (the time zone used by FIFA.com). So were Twitter feeds (although at some point Twitter crashed, as it frequently has during the World Cup). The discussion over the controversy really exploded around the internet after the game ended at 16:51, and before long, USA’s tie with Slovenia already had more Google News blog hits (850) than Serbia’s upset of Germany (701).

But on FIFA.com, the silence about USA-Slovenia has been deafening. The latest comment to appear on the discussion board has a timestamp of 20:04. In the 193-minute span between the game’s end and the latest comment’s time stamp, only 24 squeaky-clean comments have been approved. For instance: “great fightback by the USA”; “this is the right result on the balance of play”; “way to go USA”; “the match was really exciting!”; “slovenia is the best team”; “USA are becoming a real nice team!”; and “Slovenia had a great chance to qualify in the next round!! But in the second half we were too defensive.”

By comparison, in that same span of time—193 minutes—after the end of Germany-Serbia (which ended today at 14:20), there were already 175 comments posted. That’s more than seven times as many.

At one point, a user named Rossus, from South Africa, posted one comment that did, in the most polite possible way, at least hint at the idea that there might have been some controversy. Rather than suggesting any human fault, Rossus’s comment merely used the word “luck”: “I am not a USA supporter but the USA was very unlucky not to win.” But even that comment, after briefly appearing on the match overview page (which streams the latest comments), was later censored, and never made it to the discussion board page itself. The comment is no longer on the site, but I took a screen shot of it during the brief time that it appeared on the overview page, which appears here to the left.

Just to test my theory personally, I also tried posting the following comment: “I disagree with referee Koman Coulibaly’s decision to nullify the third US goal.” Sure enough, as other posts materialized on the board, mine never did. It goes without saying that FIFA.com refused to comment on or post my followup questions about what the standards were for censorship on their site.

It’s interesting to see how often, and how deeply, large organizations seem to misunderstand the purpose of discussion boards, blogs, and other internet debate and discussion fora. They seem to imagine that most users and readers won’t notice the censorship, or that they will find cleansed discussion boards to be valid platforms for authentic debate and discussion.

I suspect, though, that these organizations tend to underestimate both the curiosity of their readers and the power of the internet as a commons, and that this sort of board cleansing just leads people simply to speak with their fingers by ditching FIFA.com—in spite of its undoubtedly large software budget—and seek their information elsewhere. This goes not just for the would-be commenters that have suffered through the sting of a rejected comment, on which they might have spent a good deal of time; it also goes for the would-be readers, many of whom immediately notice that something seems fishy.

This doesn’t just undermine fans’ trust in FIFA; it also squanders an easy opportunity for the body that administers the world’s favorite sporting event to become a place where fans can share, discuss, and debate the things that they care most deeply about—thus engendering goodwill and helping to spread the good word about soccer.

Instead, the fans are turning elsewhere. A homemade-looking website called bigsoccer.com, for instance, already has 728 posts on its SerbiaSlovenia-USA discussion thread.

Its motto? “Share the passion.”

Here’s the news from today, according to the New York Times: 1,200 members of the National Guard have been sent to the border to “combat drug smuggling.” More drug-related violence can only be dealt with through greater enforcement, goes the Bush-McCain-and-now-Obama story. We’ve got to fight the war on drugs; to fight the drug criminals; to save the people from violence.

There’s just one flaw in this story: it’s got the causality going in the wrong direction. US drug policy is the cause of the current epidemic of violence and lawlessness in northern Mexico and along the border, not the cure for it. The more resources we devote to enforcing our drug prohibition, the higher we drive prices, the bigger the incentives to smuggle drugs, the bigger the spoils for the gangs of lawless criminals to whom we redirect the unimaginable profits of several massive, centuries-old industries, and the more these gangs will be willing to fight to the death over pieces of that enormous black-market pie.

By legislating common drugs out of the legal marketplace, we are creating a black market out of thin air. It is not hyperbole to suggest that US law is not just providing a subsidy of billions to the Sinaloa cartel—our laws have actually legislated the cartel, and its rivals, into existence.

Who stands to lose the most if we legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana and cocaine, and open these industries to legitimate companies? The Sinaloa cartel. We devote $11 billion of military and law enforcement resources to eliminating their competition and maintaining their monopoly power—and thus their staggering profits. They are probably the foremost advocates of the current US drug policy. Their worst nightmare would be for the marijuana industry to turn into something like tobacco: low-margin, heavily regulated, taxed, nonviolent, unglamorous, highly competitive, unable to command a risk premium. When was the last time you heard about a tobacco gang shooting?

The effects of US drug policy have never been felt more tragically in northern Mexico, where turf wars between rival drug cartels are fought. Ciudad Juárez, where the murder of innocent civilians is as commonplace as a fender-bender, is now confronting the very real prospect of a lost generation of youth—a generation so scared to walk the streets of its own city that it grows up as if in a coma, with fear the only coherent thread of civic life. In Juárez, beheadings are barely newsworthy. Is it any wonder that some of the civilians caught in this warfare would risk their lives to cross the border into the US?

A rational humanitarian policy would contemplate welcoming residents of Ciudad Juárez into the United States as war refugees. Why don’t we do this? Maybe it’s because admitting there’s a war in Mexico might mean confronting the horrifying truth that this war is ours, our failed war on drugs, and the citizens of Juárez, these would-be refugees, are our collateral damage. Washington now seems comfortable with the idea that we own the violence in Baghdad, yet the idea that we own the violence in Juárez is still Washington taboo. We don’t even believe we’re involved.

As Tax Cannabis 2010—a November 2010 referendum to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana—gains steam in California and has a slim lead in public opinion polls, with vast bipartisan support amongst academics (especially social scientists) and medical doctors, it becomes more and more bizarre that the Obama administration, far from being merely mum on the topic, has come out strongly and repeatedly in favor of the current US drug policy. Even most right-wing commentators acknowledge that our drug policy disproportionately affects minorities, imprisoning and disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of minority citizens for private behavior with public health/safety risks that, in the case of marijuana (according to the American Medical Association), are vastly less than those of high-fructose corn syrup.

Let us, as Obama might say, be perfectly clear: our supposedly pro-minority, pro-human-rights, pro-diplomacy president holds the unambiguous position that the importance of preventing Americans from smoking herb dwarfs any concerns about the uncontained numbers of murders, Mexican cities on the brink of civil war, a lost generation in northern Mexico. The administration’s decision not to go after the medical marijuana dispensaries in California now seems like a sleazy handout to his Hollywood hippie base. It is clear that enforcing the marijuana prohibition is of paramount political importance to the administration, and that the DOJ and military intend to be swift and merciless with such enforcement anywhere near our national borders.

Can we use taxpayer money to create and maintain an unprecedented network of interior border checkpoints whose dogs sniff every single person driving along the interstate highways between Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas? Yes, we can. Can we shift the focus of our military forces and allocate thousands of troops from our national guard to hunt down people who want to transport bud across the Sonora desert? Yes, we can. Can we utilize our scarce prison beds and resources to imprison and disenfranchise 600,000 nonviolent Americans for passing joints around their living rooms, even as we furlough and parole murderers and rapists because we don’t have enough room for them? Yes, we can.

Protesting Arizona’s anti-immigrant laws has become fashionable in recent weeks, and it’s been nice to see some normally staid American authority figures (like mayors and police officers) stand up for the rights of Mexicans (and people who look Hispanic) in the US. Now how about an open conversation about the fact that the US drug prohibition has created a violent black market out of thin air and, in the process, brought upon northern Mexico such a scourge of violence that millions of innocent Mexican civilians have lost the basic opportunity to lead safe, civilized lives?

As of today, Obama is no longer a mere heir of the broken US drug policy. He isn’t just carrying on the torch of keeping hundreds of thousands of nonviolent pot smokers in jail for victimless crimes. He’s now doubling down in the war on drugs. He’s increasing the subsidies for the Sinaloa cartel. He’s raising their prices and profits—and incentives to fight over more and more turf—to unprecedented levels.

This is Barack Obama’s war now: the blood of Juárez is on his hands.

The Italian Ministry of Agriculture has a recent history of operating at the curious intersection of neofascism and culinary purism. Zaia’s “zero-tolerance policy” on food fraud became famous with his 2008 bust-up of cheating Brunello di Monalcino producers, which was hailed as a victory for consumers. But in a less-reported crackdown the following year, Zaia, a member of the extreme-right-wing Lega Nord—the political party that has advocated the seccession of Northern Italy—also instituted, with Berlusconi’s backing, a policy banning new “ethnic” restaurants from opening in certain northern Italian cities, including Lucca and Milan. It was a move that the left-wing newspaper La Stampa called “culinary ethnic cleansing.” Reporting on the policy, the Times of London quoted Lucca city spokesman Massimo Di Grazia as saying that “French restaurants would be allowed”; he was “unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.” Continued the Times: “Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: ‘No—and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.’” This, from the country’s Minister of Agriculture.

Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I recall meeting, and discussing pure-ingredient fervence with, Giorgio Alemanno, who was Italy’s Minister of Agriculture at the time (this was two Ministers ago). The man talked about wine with great passion. And like Zaia, he was also an absolute right-wing zealot. As mayor of Rome, Alemanno was famous for praising Mussolini, expelling immigrants, and mowing down gypsy camps. “Upon his election,” reported the Telegraph at the time, Alemanno “was greeted by crowds of supporters, among them skinheads, who chanted ‘Duce! Duce!’ and raised their arms in a fascist salute.” It’s interesting to see Zaia, with Berlusconi’s backing, continuing in this tradition.

Certainly, when we buy mozzarella di bufala—or Brunello di Montalcino—we want to get the real thing. But if we’re enjoying what’s sold as Brunello or bufala, and feel like we’re getting our money’s worth, is the cow/Cab crime really so great?

I’ve previously discussed the thorny issue of the overzealous advocacy of a traditional recipe to the exclusion of all others. In response to Florence Fabricant’s claim, for instance, that “for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale (pork jowl),” not bacon or pancetta, I responded that “too many food writers construct a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation…harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta…People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.”

Perhaps I should revise this statement: clearly, there are some finger-wagging guanciale zealots in Italy. They tend to gravitate, it seems, toward the Ministry of Agriculture. The question of whether “zero tolerance,” when it comes to food, is fascist, patronizing, noble—or all three—is certainly one for further contemplation.

Ethics scandals are politico porn. They’re also fertile ground for undeserved scapegoating. But there’s one category in which, across the board, there’s not nearly enough public stoning going on: the world of information intermediaries. On the government side, that means regulatory agencies; in the private sector, it’s the critics, the expert witnesses in capitalism’s de facto justice system.

Information intermediaries, we’re to understand, are society’s check against puffery. They make careers of trustworthiness and accountability. In society’s service, they apply rigor to the claims of corporations and analyze their standards. For this hard work, they’re rewarded by the marketplace and by the United States—sometimes handsomely, sometimes not.

Two bits of recent news bring about two otherwise disparate intermediaries, both preeminent in their niches—Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, the publication whose critical appraisals are one of the central determinants of a wine’s success or failure on the marketplace, and the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency whose critical appraisals are the primary safety check against America’s airlines—systematically abusing that authority.

Jay Miller: Disfrutando?

Parker’s is one of the few wine publications that don’t accept advertising, for which he deserves praise. And it’s certainly acceptable to take free samples of wine from producers—that’s often the only way to taste new releases before they’ve gone to market. But the recent transgressions of Jay Miller, Robert Parker’s right-hand man, are spectacular indeed. In another classic case of the traditional print media jumping on the bandwagon of a topic that had been exposed quite a bit earlier by an incisive blogger—in this case, Tyler Colman, who goes by “Dr. Vino”—Miller’s series of all-expenses-paid vacation/junkets, financed by wine producers, have finally been reported by the mainstream media in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Some of rumors about Miller’s behavior in Argentina go quite a bit further in scandalousness than the mere acceptance of free hotels, food, and drinks. But what’s crystal clear, as reported in the Journal and, previously, by Colman—and admitted by Parker—is that the writers of Parker’s Wine Advocate accept lavish free meals from, and are flown around on weeks-long junkets by, the same wine producers whose wines they’re supposed to be critically reviewing—in Argentina and elsewhere.

Parker doesn’t just present himself as a wine writer, and he doesn’t just present Wine Advocate as a wine magazine. No, these are “consumer advocates”: in Parker’s new statement of ethical standards, which was published on eRobertParker.com after the scandal broke, he writes: “I…remain today…significantly influenced by the independent philosophy of consumer advocate Ralph Nader.” Mr. Miller’s only job is to independently criticize wines and assign numerical ratings to those wines in service to, and he is engaged in the systematic, ongoing practice of being taken on vacation by those wines’ producers.

Miller has apologized, and Parker has tried to explain himself, but Parker’s actions (or lack thereof) speak more loudly than his rambling statements on bulletin boards. If it’s even true that Parker didn’t know about Miller’s junkets beforehand (which is extremely unlikely), the fact that Parker didn’t fire Miller when he found out is a loud, clear statement that what he did really wasn’t that bad. In fact, it’s endorsed even in the new code of ethical standards. Incredibly, rather than rejecting Miller’s trips, that statement specifically renders them acceptable:

I…expect [the Wine Advocate critics], as I have done for 30+ years, not to solicit or accept free hotel accommodations or hospitality not directly related to their professional endeavors.

Not directly related to their professional endeavors? Of course a free tasting junket would be related to their professional endeavors. That’s exactly the problem!

Parker finishes his exhausting essay with a poetic flourish: “Wine is, in the final analysis, a beverage of pleasure, and intelligent wine criticism should be a blend of both hedonistic and analytical schools of thought—to the exclusion of neither.” At least the record shows that he’s got the hedonistic part down, anyway.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that over at the F.A.A., the airlines being rigorously scrutinized for adherence to strict safety standards—again, the organization’s primary responsibility—are referred to within the agency as “customers”:

In 2008, two F.A.A. inspectors assigned to Southwest Airlines testified before Congress that their managers had let Southwest fly its Boeing 737s without inspections for cracks that the safety agency required. Office managers referred to the airline as the regulatory agency’s “customer.” Top F.A.A. officials eventually conceded that the inspectors were right and the middle managers were wrong.

The Times’ investigative report tells the chilling story of an inspector named Christopher Monteleon, who voiced serious concerns about the incompetence and low safety standards of the pilots of Colgan Air a year before one of the airline’s Bombardier Dash 8-400 turboprop planes crashed in Buffalo, apparently due to pilot error. Apparently, Monteleon’s warnings were not just ignored but actually punished by his superiors:

Three times, he said, the pilots flew the airplane faster than the manufacturer’s specifications allowed, but they initially refused to report this and have the plane inspected for damage…[T]hey tried three approaches to the airport in Charleston, W. Va., and “botched” all of them, failing to get the plane at an appropriate altitude, on the right path and at the right speed for landing. “They got confused,” Mr. Monteleon said…But when he reported problems to his F.A.A. superiors, he was suspended from important portions of his job overseeing Colgan’s acquisition of the Dash 8 and given a desk job, he said…Colgan crews were flying fatigued, Mr. Monteleon said, and were not fully focused on the tasks in front of them, two factors apparently in play in the Buffalo crash. All 49 people on board the flight, which took off from Newark, were killed, along with one man on the ground. Mr. Monteleon said his supervisors were too “cozy” with Colgan, and eager to help it keep its schedule…In one memo retained by Mr. Monteleon, his manager indicates that he was reassigned because of his “conduct during a work-related duty” and because “the matter also required management to immediately respond to the operator’s scheduling needs.” The operator was Colgan.

In aviation, as in wine, our intermediaries have failed in their duty to their real customers: the readers, the consumers, the citizens. And unlike what happens when ethics scandals directly involve politicians, neither Robert Parker nor the F.A.A. is likely to be voted out of power anytime soon.

Blaming a classifieds web site for the actions of an alleged murderer is almost as absurd as blaming high-school pot smokers for September 11. Nonetheless, Craigslist has decided to remove (or at least rename) the “erotic services” category of the site. This from the New York Times:

“Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, said his office had recently notified Craigslist about an impending prostitution case that involved the erotic services category.

‘Rather than work with this office to prevent further abuses, in the middle of the night, Craigslist took unilateral action which we suspect will prove to be half-baked,’ Mr. Cuomo said in a statement.”

Putting aside the obvious hypocrisy of this particular office’s crackdown on this particular brand of consensual human behavior—and putting aside the disturbing implication that our state’s top law enforcement officer does not subscribe to the principle of innocent until proven guilty—just why is prostitution illegal, anyway?

Prostitution will always be a profession, and it may always be a profession more risky than most. But in justifying the current policy, most prostitution prohibitionists make the same type of correlation-causation mistake that the drug prohibitionists make: they assume that the ills that sometimes surround the culture of prostitution—the pimps, the STDs, the robberies, the poor working conditions, and so on—stem naturally from the activity itself.

Yet there is better evidence that the organized crime, violence, and exploitative labor structures are drawn to the industry precisely because it is illegal—and thus outside the bounds of employment law, taxation, legal remedies for fraud, and other forms of regulation.

It’s the same fundamental correlation-causation mistake that’s made again and again by the White House Office of Drug Control Policy and other War on Drugs apologists: the failure to recognize that criminal behavior often arises from black markets just because they’re black markets, not because of what’s being bought, sold, or consumed.

Even the prohibitionist op-ed contributors to the New York Times, in a piece responding to the Eliot Spitzer controversy, can’t avoid making this basic mistake:

“Whose theory is it that prostitution is victimless?…The Emperor’s Club presented itself as an elite escort service. But aside from charging more, it worked like any other prostitution business. The pimps took their 50 percent cut. The Emperor’s Club often required that the women provide sex twice an hour. One woman who was wiretapped indicated that she couldn’t handle that pressure…The transport of women for prostitution was masked by its description as ‘travel dates.’”

Do these authors really think that these working conditions would still be acceptable at brothels if the businesses were regulated under US labor law?

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the legalization, taxation, and regulation of prostitution—as has been done in Canada and Britain, among many other countries—would change the fact that when sex is sold, the transaction is usually of a certain sadness. In regimes where prostitution is legal and conditions are thus better for women—protection is enforced, wages and benefits guaranteed, and so on—the sadder party would often seem to be the man: he’s just paid hundreds of dollars for a woman to pretend she likes him for an hour.

On the other hand, anyone who assumes that the relationship between prostitute and client is never one of cordiality and good humor probably hasn’t spent much time talking to prostitutes or clients.

The anthropologist Patty Kelly has done so; she spent a year living in a Mexican brothel and studying the industry, and reports in an LA Times Op-Ed (written in the wake of the Spitzer revelation) that, in one of law enforcement’s more spectacular wastes of resources, more than 80,000 people per year are arrested for prostitution-related offenses. Ms. Kelly suggests an alternative solution:

“New Zealand’s 2003 Prostitution Reform Act is perhaps the most progressive response to the complex issue of prostitution. The act not only decriminalizes the practice but seeks to ‘safeguard the human rights of sex workers and protects them from exploitation, promotes the welfare and occupational health and safety of sex workers, is conducive to public health, [and] prohibits the use in prostitution of persons under 18 years of age.’ Furthermore, clients, sex workers and brothel owners bear equal responsibility for minimizing the risks of STD transmission. In 2005, a client was convicted of violating the act by slipping his condom off during sex.”

Imagine that.

So why isn’t US policy informed by the lessons of Prohibition?

One theory is that while lawmakers do sometimes seem to learn from our country’s mistakes, actually drawing analogies from those mistakes is a more elusive feat—as it is for law enforcement agencies, whose extraordinary leeway in choosing what and what not to pursue gives them a power to shape de facto law more than most citizens recognize.

That is, Mr. Cuomo is actively choosing to spend his time this way.

But there’s another, more intellectually plausible, explanation for why this is allowed to go on. I still remember, from law school, the famous “dwarf-tossing” debate that stood for the question of whether any consensual behavior between adults should ever be criminal. Those who believe it should tend to rely on the position that the criminal law, beyond merely creating a system of incentives, can also have a so-called “expressive” nature—society’s expression of a norm (in this case a behavior—the sale of sex—of which it disapproves) by codifying that norm in the criminal law.

But even if expressive laws are sometimes justified, they should not be imposed in cases that would result in obviously harmful human outcomes like the spread of STDs, violent robberies, the exploitation of women, or the vast waste of Mr. Cuomo’s resources on the victims of these crimes instead of their perpetrators.

The US prohibition on prostitution is no more justifiable than—and, in fact, strikingly similar to—the Catholic church’s prohibition on the use of condoms. When lawmakers, whatever their honest “expressive” intentions, maintain a public policy that is acknowledged to bring about disease and violence, they are willfully putting their own constituents in harm’s way.

Should we stage a Boston Wine Party, and throw our wine into the Atlantic?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the bewilderingly diverse wines on display at this week’s FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, is the price range: 2€–5€ is most common, trailed slightly by <2€ (a significant category, with strong representation from La Mancha, the wine fair’s home region) and 5€–10€.

In the 2€–3€ range are a vast assortment of sometimes steely, often aromatic, almost always appropriately acidic whites from Castilla-La Mancha and other lesser-known regions. If you want a 1994 or 1995 Gran Reserva from La Mancha—an eminently mature Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Tempranillo-Cabernet blend—it might cost you up to 6€.

All of this is a prescient reminder of the three-tined gouging of the American wallet—and, by extension, of the American palate—that defines our wine industry.

The first tine is regulatory: the unconscionable customs duties imposed at our borders, and, worse still, the preposterous bureaucratic labeling and testing rules that are imposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. (Is there anything that more clearly reveals our government’s still-Puritanical view of wine drinking as a vice than this agency’s name?)

The irony of these idiotic rules, at least as concerns the importation of Spanish wine, is that the EU’s own regulation of so-called “quality wine” (i.e. non-table wine) is actually far more restrictive than our own domestic wine laws, which allow all sorts of preservatives and additives that would be illegal in Europe.

Yet we force Spanish wine producers to spend thousands of dollars in farcical chemical analysis (a boondoggle for sham chem-lab outfits that have been legislated into existence) and an onerous label-approval process. These arbitrary, extortionist barriers to entry function like a medieval wax seal, blocking much of Europe’s best-value wine from ever showing up in America.

This protectionist regime reminds me of the brief rule of Abdalá Bucaram in Ecuador. Before President Bucaram was removed from office after six months for “mental incapacity,” he famously (okay, famously in Ecuador, anyway) imposed a 1000% “luxury tax” on imported wines and liquors. The toxic effects of the luxury tax on consumers were a principal reason for his ouster. (The silver lining was that Ecuador got its first woman president, Rosalía Arteaga, who had been Bucaram’s vice-president—before the legislature got rid of her, too, two days later.)

US wine policy doesn’t just rob consumers blind—it also takes away pressure on our own producers to compete globally on price, which ultimately works against them. Ever wonder why the US exports so little wine?

The second tine is legislative: the extraordinary markups that importers and distributors still take are protected by a state-by-state three-tier system (importer–distributor–retailer/restaurant) that was set up at the repeal of Prohibition for the sole purpose of limiting how much Americans drink.

In the civilized modern world, wine stores are allowed to buy wine from wine producers, and sell it at a reasonable markup. In our bizzarro world, a middleman is legislatively mandated.

These archaic blue laws and the industry that they have engendered—artifacts of an era in which the religious fervor that brought about Prohibition was still a very real cultural norm—continue to rob consumers of billions of dollars, year after year.

The third tine is what happens in restaurants: wine multiples of 2.5x, 3x, or even 4x. When US consumers are being asked to pay $40 at retail for a wine that sells in Spain for 3€, we’re exactly matching Bucaram’s 1000% markup.

In short, if we were to do a Spanish version of The Wine Trials—Fearless Critic’s guide to inexpensive wines—its price cut-off wouldn’t be anywhere near the $15 per bottle that it is in the US.  would probably be limited to wines under 5€, or US$6.65—or perhaps even under 3€, or US$2.25.

The Spanish wine industry, of course, deserves a lot of credit for pricing so reasonably. Congress should be deeply ashamed of its consistent record of preventing our own country’s industry from doing so.