rmurphy wrote:In the meantime can anyone provide answers to the following questions?
The problem with a lot of these questions is that they may depend on the whim of a given customs inspector on a given day.
I once brought in about 40 bottles (nothing like Eric's stash, though) of Northern Italian and Slovenian wines on a trip when I collected way too much to carry home. I had them boxed and sent back from Ljubljana on Lufthansa freight while I was flying back from Venice on Alitalia. I didn't hire a broker - the folks at Customs suggested that it wasn't really necessary, and they helped me walk through the paperwork. It took several hours, I had to go to three different offices, and the customs guy mentioned in passing that it would be his determination whether this was a commercial or personal transaction. He said he was satisfied that I was doing it for my own use but if I had just a few more bottles it would have been a tougher call.
As an individual, my duties were based on quantity, not value, but I still had to estimate value of each bottle, which was tough since most of them were offbeat Slovenian wines never intended for export and I had no idea. (I told him $10 each, and that seemed to satisfy him.)
Bottom line, customs only cost me about $25, but shipping was about $300 for 36 bottles, which was pretty outrageous, and as I said there was a lot of time wasted. Also, two nice bottles were broken in such a way as to make me strongly suspect that some baggage handlers somewhere along the way had knocked off the necks in order to enjoy a nice wine with their lunch.
As I said, I honestly wouldn't do it again.
Your friend can probably tell you a lot more about the gory details than we can. Are you comfortable telling us who he works for? I'm wondering if I know him.