Sorry for the delay, these rehab meetings always take longer than you think.
Anyway, the ABC law is a mess on its own. (The email response they sent is great proof of that). Throw in tax law and I'd rather castrate myself with a blender than try to sort the whole thing out. My curiosity just doesn't have the pep it once did.
So rather than try to figure out how the two are intertwined to the point of any legal certainty, I'd look for the easy way out instead. How about we find someone we don't like and ask them to ship the bottle back?
I will note that come the holiday season, I have heard of several law firms who overnight bottles of wine to their big clients as a gift. Which, if these wholly unsubstantiated rumors are true, would lead me to suspect that enforcement of the rule prohibiting shipping of booze is not strictly enforced. As someone astutely noted above, the state, with its limited resources, is probably going to want to focus their efforts on those with the greatest return, like someone regularly shipping hundreds of cases, and not some poor schlub who is trying to return one bottle that was incorrectly shipped.
(Incidentally, how much are we talking here? If this is a $20 bottle of wine, I doubt the CA retailer is going to care much if they ever see it again.)