By visiting this site or registering, will my e-mail address or any other information about me EVER be sold or given to third parties?

NO. NEVER. The reason I can be so emphatic is simply because Ice Bucket Selections has NO financial incentive to share your information with third parties. As you can see, there are no pop ups or ads on the site, which eliminates the primary incentive to “share” (a less-threatening way of saying “sell”). While there is some incentive to sell or rent any mailing list that is developed on the site, I pledge to never do so. Of course, any visitor to the site will be able to read posts, so don’t post anything you wouldn’t want read by others.

What’s with the ice bucket? Does that mean you only sell white wines?

While I admit my bias toward whites, I also believe that man and woman can’t live by white alone. So, yes, I bring in reds as well, and count some of them as among my very favorite wines. The ice bucket image suggests (hopefully) élan and freshness, and is not intended to promote red-based prejudice.

Where can I find Ice Bucket Selections wines?

Please go to the Find Wines section of the site. There you will find details about the New York City restaurants, wine bars and wine stores that carry Ice Bucket Selections wines.

What if I want to buy directly from Ice Bucket Selections?

Sorry, thanks to the wisdom of various governing bodies and agencies, it is very cumbersome to import, distribute and then sell directly to the public. Ice Bucket Selections is legally permitted to sell only to retailers, wine bars and restaurants. But that’s a good thing; by purchasing an Ice Bucket Selections wine, you are not only making me and the family that made the wine happy, you’re spreading the happiness to the proprietor of the place where you bought the wine, too.

So, does this mean that if I don’t live in New York City, I can’t get Ice Bucket Selections wines?

Maybe, maybe not. Certainly, if you’re in the big city for any reason, you’ll be able to find them by visiting the Find Wines section of the site and then going to any of those places. Ice Bucket Selections is not licensed to sell via the net or otherwise directly to consumers. But you can probably get just about any wine store that carries Ice Bucket Selections wines to ship to you if you live anywhere in the state. If you’re outside of New York, it depends on the laws of your state. It would be impossible to even begin to provide you with any guidance on this subject (and I’m a lawyer by trade). Sorry.

Where are the Spanish, Chilean, Australian wines? And for that matter, how come there’s no Bordeaux?

Those questions go to the very heart of why I formed Ice Bucket Selections. Rather than chase trends, or anticipate them, for that matter, I decided to concentrate only on those wines and appellations I know best and enjoy the most. I have great respect for anyone who makes wine anywhere, and while I’m more than knowledgeable about all of the world’s leading wine regions (and many of its far lesser-knowns as well), I believe the wine world is so big and diverse that it’s best for me to focus on what inspires me. And those wines come from a few select places, like Champagne, Burgundy and Piedmont.

What do I do if my local doesn’t carry an Ice Bucket Selections wine that I want?

That’s easy: Tell them (politely, please) that you want that wine. Invariably, if a proprietor of a wine store, in particular, is told more than once that someone wants to spend money in his or her store but can’t because what is wanted isn’t carried there, you can be sure that the next time you come in, it will be. Wine bars and restaurants are trickier. However, if you ask, and then most importantly, send me an e-mail or post on the site, I will immediately try to arrange a sales call and see if that situation can be rectified.

What do I do if an Ice Bucket Selections bottle I buy is corked?

Tell whomever you got the wine from as soon as you can. In every case, you should either get your money back or a replacement bottle. It’s sometimes more complicated than that, but because the venues that carry Ice Bucket Selections wines truly care about what they sell, you can almost be guaranteed that they will do the right thing. In the event you receive resistance, e-mail me or post on the site. I will do everything I can to take care of the situation.

Note, however, that the question concerned a “corked” bottle, not a “bad” bottle or a bottle you didn’t like. The rules for these situations should be easy enough to follow but there is a great deal of confusion among many consumers concerning both their rights and their obligations after buying a bottle.

Unfortunately, most of the consumers who have sent back a bottle in a restaurant or returned one to a wine store have probably never experienced a classically corked wine. Those who have had the misfortune are forever left with an indelible corked imprint. In the wine world we inhabit today, there really aren’t any “bad” bottles; there are countless uninteresting ones, and perhaps many, many more that you may not particularly like, but that doesn’t make them “bad.”

In the wine world, “bad” can only connote “corked,” otherwise there is no fair way to hold a seller of that bottle accountable. I often hear from wine store owners, and particularly restaurateurs, that they will take back a so-called bad bottle simply for PR purposes. That’s their choice, of course, but it shouldn’t be expected of them. If you buy a wine that doesn’t suit your mood or taste—hopefully, it won’t be an Ice Bucket Selections wine!—then it’s really up to you to grin and bear it; at least you learned something.

More vexing is the situation where the bottle is peu de bouché, as the French would say. It means that the wine is a little bit off; it might be only mildly corked or it might have been mishandled and show signs of premature age and oxidation. This situation is a loss for everyone in the chain. Unless you drink a lot of wine from the appellation where that wine comes from, you might not even realize that the wine is a bit off. You may only think that it’s just not your cup of tea, which is too bad because it might have been a wine style that you would have truly enjoyed. It hurts the rest of us on the supply side, too, because we may have lost the only chance we had to show you a wine from some part of the world that you weren’t familiar with but were willing to take a chance on. (If you’re an experienced taster of that type of wine, then the rules for dealing with a corked bottle should apply.)

The good news is that very few bottles are actually corked or even a little off. I actually believe that there are more off bottles than outright corked bottles to begin with. I’ve tasted thousands and thousands of wines in all sorts of conditions and of all different ages, and I can honestly say that I’ve encountered less than 100 outright corked ones, and perhaps twice that of off bottles. Not a bad percentage. It’s the kind of thing that is talked about far more than it’s actually experienced.