Everything You Need To Know About Bringing Wine Home As A Souvenir

Unsplash/Matt Lamers

After a fabulous wine vacation in your favorite wine region, there’s only one souvenir that feels right. It has to be bottle of the best vino you tasted. Imagine pouring yourself a drink of that unforgettable pinot in your living room. Think of the memories that will come flooding back. But how do you get that precious bottle back to your home?

Back in the day, you could just slip a bottle of wine into your carry-on. But now, liquid restrictions dictate the fate of your wine. It needs to be checked, just like any other liquid container larger than 3.4 fluid ounces.

You’re allowed to bring up to five liters of alcohol in your checked bag. For reference, your average bottle of wine has less than one liter of liquid inside. So that means you could bring as many as five bottles in your suitcase. All bottles must be sealed; you can’t bring your half-empty cabernet home with you.

There’s one caveat: Alcohol content. Now, this (hopefully) won’t apply to your wine, but drinks with a high alcohol content aren’t allowed in your carry-on or checked bags. That means anything with more than 70 percent alcohol content (that’s 140 proof) has to stay on the ground.

Unsplash/Guillermo Nolasco

If you do decide to bring a bottle in your suitcase, make sure it’s carefully packed. You can wrap wine in your extra clothes or ask the wine vendor to wrap it up for you to insulate your wine from any bumps or bruises that might occur in transit. However, if you want to pack more than a couple of bottles, you probably want to get some special packing materials.

Bringing some vino back from abroad? Make sure to declare it on your customs form. That way, when you’re going through border control, they won’t be surprised to see wine in your suitcase. Any food, drinks or expensive purchases need to be disclosed when you return to the United States.

P.S. You can’t drink your wine on the plane. We know, you can’t wait to sip some of the delish sauvignon blanc, but it’s against the rules to drink any alcohol on an airplane that’s not served to you by the airline. So just wait until you get home to pop that bottle.

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