Longtime fans of Uncorked know that we often complain about the influence that the nation’s liquor distributors wield when it comes to protecting their legal monopoly.

We’ve written about the shocking amounts of money they give and the appalling amounts of access to lawmakers that cash buys them.

We’ve shown how, in an effort to protect what would – at most – constitute a loss of 1 percent of their business, they were willing to destroy Indiana’s entire wine industry and how lawmakers almost did it for them.

But so far, especially after a U.S. Supreme Court decision threatened to allow wine lovers to – gasp! – order wine directly from a winery and have it shipped to their homes, most of those efforts by distributors have been piecemeal, state by state.

No more.

On April 15, U.S. Rep. Bill Delahunt, R-Mass., a Republican from Massachusetts, introduced a bill written by a liquor distributors’ trade group. The bill attempts to make it basically impossible to challenge state laws regulating alcohol shipping, even if they are blatantly discriminatory against other states.

See, many states, including Indiana, used to have laws that allowed in-state wineries to ship wine directly to customers but prohibited out-of-state wineries from doing so. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 said the Constitution’s Commerce Clause prohibits states from discriminating against each other that way. Either allow all wineries to ship or no wineries to ship, the court said.

This new bill would not only make that kind of discrimination OK but also spells out that there is almost no way to challenge that discrimination.

Certainly no upstanding members of Congress would fall for such a charade, would they? Well, 118 members of the House have so far, signing on as co-sponsors.

From Indiana, Rep. Andre Carson, Rep. Joe Donnelly, Rep. Brad Ellsworth (who is running for the U.S. Senate) and Rep. Peter Visclosky have all signed on.

There’s no way to predict whether this bill has legs. It’s been assigned to the Committee on the Judiciary and could die there just as easily as take off. There’s also no way to know for sure whether it would pass constitutional muster – we’re not attorneys, but it seems doubtful that the Supreme Court would agree that something it had declared unconstitutional would suddenly become constitutional just because Congress says it is.

But even if it were to be rejected by the court, that action could be years or even decades down the road, and there is no telling what damage could be done to small wineries in the meantime.

And let’s be clear about this: It is small, family wineries and people who love their wines that would suffer, while the only ones to gain would be big distributors that would see what is already a legal monopoly and make it an unassailable, unchallengeable monopoly.

And do you think that monopoly will not run roughshod over small wineries and their customers? Remember, this is the same group that already was willing to put every winery in Indiana out of business – and your General Assembly, which calls itself pro-business, pro-small business, pro-family business, pro-farm, pro-tourism and pro-agri-tourism, was ready to do it for them.

It was only because of your calls and letters that their first effort was – barely – stopped, and even then it resulted in a compromise that is still hobbling Indiana’s wineries to this day, to the point that one winery went out of business because of it.

So while you sit there and read this, you may be getting mad, you may be getting outraged, you may be telling your significant other to read it and post it on Facebook or Tweet it, but are you angry enough to pick up the phone and call Ellsworth or Visclosky or Donnelly or Carson? Angry enough to write a letter?

Because while you grumble to your spouse, the distributors are taking your congressman out to dinner. They’re giving him luxury-suite tickets to sporting events. They’re paying for his re-election. They’re donating to the charities where his spouse is on the boards. They’re hiring lobbyists. And it’s all aimed at making sure the congressman hears exactly what they want him to hear.

Meanwhile, unless you call or write to him, what the congressman hears from you is: Nothing.

Cheers!